Edited by

Andrew Smith and William Hughes

Empire and the Gothic

The Politics of Genre

Empire and the Gothic

Also by Andrew Smith and William Hughes

BRAM STOKER: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic

FICTIONS OF UNEASE: The Gothic from Otranto to the X-Files
(co-edited with Diane Mason)

Also by Andrew Smith

GOTHIC RADICALISM: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the
Nineteenth Century

GOTHIC MODERNISMS (co-edited with Jeff Wallace)

DRACULA AND THE CRITICS

Also by William Hughes

THE LADY OF THE SHROUD by Bram Stoker (editor)

BEYOND DRACULA: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context

BRAM STOKER: A Bibliography

CONTEMPORARY WRITING AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
(co-edited with Tracey Hill)

Empire and the Gothic

The Politics of Genre

Edited by

Andrew Smith

Senior Lecturer in English
University of Glamorgan

and

William Hughes

Senior Lecturer in English
Bath Spa University College

Selection and editorial matter © Andrew Smith and William Hughes 2003
Chapter 13 © Dominic Head 2003
All other chapters © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2003

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with
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Empire and the Gothic : the politics of genre / edited by Andrew Smith and William
Hughes.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: Enlightenment Gothic and postcolonialism / Andrew Smith and

William Hughes – Discovering Eastern horrors : Beckford, Maturin, and the
discourse of travel literature / Massimiliano Demata – Charlotte Dacre’s
postcolonial moor / Kim Michasiw – Frankenstein and Devi’s pterodactyl / Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak – Pushkin and Odoevsky : the ‘Afro-Finnish’ theme in Russian
Gothic / Neil Cornwell – A singular invasion : revisiting the postcoloniality of
Bram Stoker’s Dracula / William Hughes – Beyond colonialism : death and the body
in H. Rider Haggard / Andrew Smith – Horror, circus, and orientalism / Helen
Stoddart – Burning down the master’s (prison)-house : revolution and revelation in
colonial and postcolonial female Gothic / Carol Davison – Crossing boundaries :
the revision of Gothic paradigms in Heat and dust / Mariaconcetta Costantini –
The ghastly and the ghostly : the Gothic farce of Farrell’s Empire trilogy / Victor
Sage – Arundhati Roy and the house of history / David Punter – The number of
magic alternatives : Salman Rushdie’s 1001 Gothic nights / Andrew Teverson –
Coetzee and the animals : the quest for postcolonial grace / Dominic Head.

ISBN 0–333–98405–6 (cloth)

1. Gothic revival (Literature)

2. Horror tales, English – History and criticism.

3. Political ﬁction, English – History and criticism.
4. Decolonization in literature.

5. Imperialism in literature.

6. Postcolonialism.

7. Literary form.

I. Smith, Andrew, 1964–

II. Hughes, William, 1964–

PR830.T3 E536 2003
823’.0872909 – dc21

2002029889

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Lorna Sage

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Notes on the Contributors

Introduction: Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism

Andrew Smith and William Hughes

1 Discovering Eastern Horrors: Beckford, Maturin, and the

Discourse of Travel Literature

Massimiliano Demata

2 Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial Moor

Kim Ian Michasiw

3 Frankenstein and Devi’s Pterodactyl

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

4 Pushkin and Odoevsky: the ‘Afro-Finnish’ Theme in

Russian Gothic

Neil Cornwell

5 A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcoloniality of

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

William Hughes

6 Beyond Colonialism: Death and the Body in

H. Rider Haggard

103

Andrew Smith

7 Horror, Circus and Orientalism

118

Helen Stoddart

8 Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)-House: Revolution and

Revelation in Colonial and Postcolonial Female Gothic

136

Carol Margaret Davison

9 Crossing Boundaries: the Revision of Gothic Paradigms in

Heat and Dust

155

Mariaconcetta Costantini

vii

10 The Ghastly and the Ghostly: the Gothic Farce of Farrell’s

‘Empire Trilogy’

172

Victor Sage

11 Arundhati Roy and the House of History

192

David Punter

12 The Number of Magic Alternatives: Salman Rushdie’s 1001

Gothic Nights

208

Andrew Teverson

13 Coetzee and the Animals: the Quest for Postcolonial Grace

229

Dominic Head

Index

245

viii

Contents

Preface

This volume combines postcolonial theory with scholarship on the
Gothic. Gothic images of alienation, fragmentation and Otherness
are read through postcolonial ideas relating to alterity. This coming
together of two areas of critical enquiry reassesses both the Gothic and
the idea that the colonial and the postcolonial can be unproblemati-
cally periodized. Following an introduction which explores the histori-
cal background, the book addresses a range of writings from Ireland,
England, imperial Russia, India and South Africa from the late-
eighteenth century to the present day.

Andrew Smith and William Hughes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Eleanor Birne at Palgrave for her enthusiasm for
this project and Emily Rosser and Becky Mashayekh for their patience.
We would like to thank Jeff Wallace for his advice and Colin Gent for
his technical support. We would also like to thank Joanne Benson and
Diane Mason for their love, support and tolerance throughout the
editing process.

Notes on the Contributors

Neil Cornwell is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the
University of Bristol. A graduate of London University, he wrote his PhD
while lecturing at Queen’s University, Belfast. Among his books are two
studies of Vladimir Odoevsky (1986 and 1998), The Literary Fantastic
(1990), Pushkin’s ‘The Queen of Spades’ (1993; second edition 2001), and
The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (1999). He
has also edited Reference Guide to Russian Literature (1998) and The
Routledge Companion to Russian Literature (2001). He is Russian editor of
the (online) Literary Encyclopedia.

Mariaconcetta Costantini is Associate Professor of English at the
University ‘G. d’Annunzio’ of Pescara (Italy), where she received her
PhD in English Literature. She has published extensively on Victorian
literature (Gaskell, Dickens, Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Hardy and
Wilkie Collins), postmodern ﬁction and the postcolonial novel. She is
the author of Poesia e Sovversione. Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley
Hopkins (2000).

Carol Margaret Davison is an Assistant Professor of English Literature
at the University of Windsor. She was granted her doctorate from McGill
University in 1998 and is the editor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1897–1997:
Sucking Through the Century and the author of Anti-Semitism and British
Gothic Fiction (forthcoming from Palgrave).

Massimiliano Demata is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Univer-
sity of Bari, Italy, and lives and works in Oxford. He has taken his DPhil
at St Cross College, University of Oxford, and was a Fulbright Fellow at
Yale University. He has published articles on Byron, the Gothic Novel,
Romantic women poets and the history of the book and, together with
Duncan Wu, has co-edited British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review.
Bicentenary Essays (forthcoming, 2002) for Palgrave.

Dominic Head is Professor of English at Brunel University. He gained
an MA and a PhD at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The
Modernist Short Story (1992), Nadine Gordimer (1994), and J.M. Coetzee

(1997), all published by Cambridge University Press, and The Cambridge
Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 (2002).

William Hughes was educated at the Liverpool Collegiate School and
the University of East Anglia. He is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at
Bath Spa University College. His recent publications include Beyond
Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context (2000) and Bram
Stoker: A Bibliography (1997), and he has also co-edited three volumes of
critical essays: Contemporary Writing and National Identity (1995, with
Tracey Hill), Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (1998,
with Andrew Smith) and Fictions of Unease: The Gothic from Otranto to
The X-Files (2002, with Andrew Smith and Diane Mason). He is editor
of Gothic Studies, the journal of the International Gothic Association,
published by Manchester University Press.

Kim Ian Michasiw received his doctorate from the University of
Toronto and is currently Associate Professor and Chair of English at York
University. Editor of the OUP edition of Zoﬂoya, he has published arti-
cles on Percy Shelley, William Gilpin, Henry Mackenzie, Elvis Presley
and various professional issues. He is working on alternative subjec-
tivities in the later eighteenth century, from Edward Young to Joanna
Southcott.

David Punter is Professor of English at the University of Bristol. His
many publications include books on the Gothic (The Literature of Terror,
1980, revised edition 1996, and Gothic Pathologies: the Text, the Body and
the Law, 1998) and on the postcolonial (Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions
of a New World Order, 2000), as well as other books on Romanticism,
critical theory and contemporary writing.

Victor Sage, who is a graduate of the Universities of Durham,
Birmingham and East Anglia, is Professor of English Literature in the
School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia.
He was a founder member of the International Gothic Association and
has written widely on the Gothic tradition. He is the editor for Penguin
Classics of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth The Wanderer and Joseph
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas. He is currently writing a cultural history
of European horror for Polity Press.

Andrew Smith completed his PhD at Southampton University. He is
Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Glamorgan. He is the

xii

Notes on the Contributors

author of Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in
the Nineteenth Century (2000) and has co-edited (with William Hughes)
Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (1998), (with Jeff
Wallace) Gothic Modernisms (2001) and (with Diane Mason and William
Hughes) Fictions of Unease: the Gothic from Otranto to The X-Files (2002).
His monograph, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic
at the Fin de Siècle is forthcoming.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the
Humanities at Columbia University and the author of many books,
including A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999).

Helen Stoddart is a Lecturer in Film and Literature in the Department
of English at Keele University. She is a graduate of the Universities of
Glasgow (MA) and Reading (PhD). She has published a number of
articles on Gothic ﬁlm and ﬁction. She is the author of Rings of Desire:
Circus History and Representation (2000), and is currently working on a
further related project.

Andrew Teverson took his MA and BA at Durham University, and PhD
at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His forthcoming publi-
cations include essays on Vikram Chandra’s ﬁction, the sculpture of
Anish Kapoor and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. He is
currently working as a Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London.

Notes on the Contributors

xiii

Introduction: The Enlightenment
Gothic and Postcolonialism

Andrew Smith and William Hughes

Theories of postcolonialism and scholarship on the Gothic might,
superﬁcially, appear to be the product of rather different intellectual,
cultural and historical traditions. The Gothic, a fantastical literary form
that had its heyday in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth cen-
turies might seem to inhabit a different world than that confronted by
writers working in postcolonial contexts in the twenty-ﬁrst century.
However, the picture is more complex than this because an historical
examination of the Gothic and accounts of postcolonialism indicate the
presence of a shared interest in challenging post-enlightenment notions
of rationality. In the Gothic, as in Romanticism in general, this chal-
lenge was developed through an exploration of the feelings, desires and
passions which compromised the Enlightenment project of rationally
calibrating all forms of knowledge and behaviours. The Gothic gives a
particular added emphasis to this through its seeming celebration of the
irrational, the outlawed and the socially and culturally dispossessed.

It is this challenge to Enlightenment notions of rationality which

has also drawn the attention of postcolonial critics. Such criticism has
tended to focus on how the epistemic shift from Renaissance human-
ism to Enlightenment humanism registered a corresponding shift from
knowing to understanding. This new Enlightenment humanism placed
the stress on how the subject knows, rather than what he or she knows.
Such a shift makes the (Cartesian) subject the measure of all things, and
this conceptualization of humanity was reliant on deﬁning the human
in relation to the seemingly non-human. According to Leela Gandhi,
‘Western humanism produces the dictum that since some human beings
are more human than others, they are more substantially the measure
of all things’.

It is this Enlightenment view which helps to construct

the racial hierarchies which would come to underpin colonialism. The

0333_984056_02_intr.qxd 11/12/2002 1:20 PM Page 1

claim that such a position relies on the exclusion of ‘otherness’ ﬁnds its
corollary in the Gothic’s fascination with raising often difﬁcult ques-
tions about what it means to be human. The Gothic use of non-human
and ab-human ﬁgures such as vampires, ghosts and monsters of various
kinds is calculated to challenge the dominant humanist discourse, and
thus becomes, as this volume shows, a literary form to which post-
colonial writers are drawn, as well as constituting a literary form which
can be read through postcolonial ideas.

Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (1970) explored how the de-

velopment of the human sciences was related to the emergence of an
Enlightenment subjectivity. For Foucault, in the eighteenth century, the
subject becomes both an object of knowledge (one that is understood
‘scientiﬁcally’) and a subject who knows (one that is interpreted
‘metaphysically’).

For Leela Ghandi this supposedly ‘objective’ status

of the subject contributed to certain pseudo-scientiﬁc taxonomies relat-
ing to race, and has a vestigial presence in much of today’s science. Such
a humanist position is grounded in the Cartesian notion that the self
is at the centre of the world and the consequence of this for Ghandi is
that:

the all-knowing and self-sufﬁcient Cartesian subject violently negates
material and historical alterity/Otherness in its narcissistic desire
to always see the world in its own self-image. This anthropocentric
world view is ultimately deﬁcient on account of its indifference to
difference, and consequent refusal to accommodate that which is not
human.

However, the process of refusal is perhaps more dynamic than this since
the Cartesian subject is dependent on excluding the Other in order to
determine its own position; as a result, a series of binary oppositions such
as Occident/Orient, black/white and civilized/savage come to underpin
colonialist ideas. One consequence of this is that Enlightenment sub-
jectivity generates its own opposite, in such a way that the subject is
precariously deﬁned through historically contingent (and therefore
provisional) oppositions. Also, this kind of science will try to account for
what it by deﬁnition cannot know and in the process draws attention
to its own failings. It is this paradox that David Punter sees as central to
an understanding of the ambivalence of the early literary Gothic: he
notes that ‘[t]o consider the passions and the emotions as mere subject
faculties to be brought under the sway of all-dominant reason, as the
Enlightenment thinkers did, will render those faculties all the more

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incomprehensible.’

The Enlightenment therefore produces its own

doubles.

This reference to doubling is not fortuitous. The function of the

double is central to Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), which has
been highly inﬂuential on Gothic scholarship.

Freud claims that the

uncanny, the unheimlich, becomes truly uncanny when it collapses
into its ostensibly opposite term ‘homely’ or heimlich. This conﬂation
of opposites (which occurs because the home is also the place of
dangerous ‘private’ secrets) enables a Gothic collapse between living/
dead, human/non-human, and self/other. This model of collapse also
underpins the process in which the colonizing subject is displaced in
its confrontation with racial otherness, an otherness that is both
strange, distanced and exotic, and yet the site upon which racial, psy-
chological, and sexual anxieties are projected. In effect difference and
distance become erased.

These links between colonialism and the Gothic are clear in an early

work such as William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) which is discussed in
this volume by Massimiliano Demata (Chapter 1). Michael Franklin has
referred to Beckford’s novel as a ‘landmark in the history of European
literary Orientalism’ and has noted that other notable contributions
to this coming together of the Gothic and the colonial include such
Gothicized poems as Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir (1798) and Robert
Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810).

This is to acknowledge that the early Gothic incorporated within its
anti-Enlightenment fervour a set of complex views on the East,
although often in order to consolidate rather than to question the kind
of Orientalism identiﬁed by Edward Said.

One of the deﬁning ambiva-

lences of the Gothic is that its labelling of otherness is often employed
in the service of supporting, rather than questioning, the status quo.
This is perhaps the central complexity of the form because it debates
the existence of otherness and alterity, often in order to demonize such
otherness. However, any restoration of Enlightenment certainty tends
to be compromised by the presence of a debate within the Gothic con-
cerning the relationship between rationality and irrationality.

Gothic tales, their contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences,

provide a dense and complex blend of assertion and doubt, acceptance
and deﬁance, and truth and falsity and in this way they provide a space
in which key elements of the dominant culture become debated,
afﬁrmed and questioned. It is because of this that a postcolonial mode
of enquiry, one underpinned by a poststructuralist scepticism, is able to
open up the political dimension of these narratives without denying

Introduction

0333_984056_02_intr.qxd 11/12/2002 1:20 PM Page 3

their fundamental complexities. Postcolonialism helps to isolate images
of Self and Other in such a way that they identify how a particular brand
of colonial politics works towards constructing difference, whilst at the
same time indicating the presence of the inherently unstable version of
the subject on which such a politics rest. In other words, postcolonial-
ism explains the Gothic’s instabilities by other means.

It is important to note that there are therefore two related issues

which this volume addresses. One is concerned with analysing work by
writers whom we consider to be writing out of a postcolonial context.
In this volume this aspect of postcolonial criticism includes work by
Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, J.M. Coetzee and J.G. Farrell. These
writers have used the Gothic in their writings in order to examine how
images of otherness have been made to correspond to particular notions
of terror (in terms of either political uprisings or anxieties about race,
for example). In this way their work acknowledges this link between the
Gothic and the colonial, and this acknowledgement is generated out of
a postcolonial reassessment of such a link. The other issue which this
volume addresses concerns Gothic writing which was produced within
a colonialist context, and which may be usefully interpreted in the light
of postcolonial ideas. In this way it becomes possible to examine such
texts as Vathek for example, in order to illustrate how a Gothic language
of otherness becomes conﬂated with images of colonial otherness. Again,
it is the politics of the ﬁction which are the issue here. These early, colo-
nial, Gothic narratives are illuminated by such postcolonial readings
which are responsive to the complexities both of the form and to the
culture from which they were produced. This is also to acknowledge
that there are clear differences between the terms ‘empire’ and ‘post-
colonialism’. Some of the essays in this volume read how postcolonial
texts rework earlier anxieties about empire, whereas others read, post-
colonially, earlier narratives of empire.

This volume follows the pioneering work of Edward Said and Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak (whose work is included here) on orientalism and
postcolonialism. It is also indebted to that scholarship on the Gothic
which has considered the relationship between the form and colonial-
ist ideas. The key text in this area is, clearly, Patrick Brantlinger’s Rule
of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914 (1988) in which
he usefully identiﬁed the emergence of an Imperial Gothic with which
subsequent Gothic writers were forced to contend.

Brantlinger, like

his contemporary Chris Baldick, has established as a consequence of
his pioneering critical stance a mode of criticism – and, potentially, a
discursive limitation – which subsequent critics have had to bear con-

Empire and the Gothic

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stantly in mind when working in this relatively unexplored corner of
the Gothic ﬁeld. If the present collection can be said to have moved
signiﬁcantly beyond the temporal and spatial limitations necessarily
imposed by Brantlinger upon his volume, then it might also be recog-
nized as having moved beyond the characteristic (and persistent) inter-
textuality which Baldick has brought to bear in his own landmark
contribution to the postcolonial and imperial Gothic, In Frankenstein’s
Shadow (1987). Baldick is emphatic throughout his study that Gothic
writers up to and including Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence have
exploited ‘the Frankenstein myth’, which is functionally a discursive
and cultural trope as much as a ﬁctional paradigm, and in consequence
have shaped a whole consciousness wherein and whereby monstro-
sity and deviance might be perceived and communicated.

Baldick’s

rhetoric, though, is at times tense and even forced, as if to evade the
notion that the drive to shape, create or synthesize which he applies to
an encoded vision of colonization might not be applied with equal force
to any aspect of nineteenth-century mission. What is crucial about
Baldick’s contribution to postcolonial criticism is not the paradigm-
persistence (or intertextual equivalence) which allows him to suggest,
for example, that Conrad’s Congolese expedition is ‘the equatorial
equivalent to Walton’s voyage’ but rather the more subtle point, echoed
in the later work of H.L. Malchow, that the Gothic, in both its ﬁctional
and critical guises, may shape another discourse – not merely the cul-
tural commentaries upon world politics and local monstrosities, but
equally the tenor of criticism itself.

The implication of the papers

which follow is that critical landmarks of the importance of the writ-
ings of Baldick and Brantlinger ought to be acknowledged, but need not
be slavishly followed. As Malchow and Gelder both assert, Imperial
Gothic might conventionally be considered as a vehicle through which
to dissipate or proclaim ‘cultural malaise’, a phenomenon that advances
an unsettling of the customary structures of ﬁction as well as those of
ﬁctionalized (or encoded) colonial governance.

This is, in many

respects, a rather reassuring use of demonization, a Gothicizing of
culture through the Gothic languages of both ﬁctional symbolism and
critical Othering. A more troubling view comes, paradoxically, from
Gelder’s own writing on Postcolonial Gothic. Viewed against the grain
of critical closure, the ﬁgure of the vampire, a Gothic myth as potent
and persistent as that of Frankenstein’s creation, arguably holds the
potential to transform the troublesome deviant into an enfranchized
and outgoing citizen of the world.

As Alexandra Warwick suggests, in

‘colonial Gothic’, both landscape and people (indigenous or otherwise)

Introduction

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are seen as uncanny, ‘beyond the possibilities of explanation in
European terms’.

As the essays in this collection demonstrate, this may

often be the case, but the Gothic and the uncanny may also be present
all too often in the newly appreciated mundane, the heimlich as much
as the unheimlich.

The chapters in this book explore writings from a range of different

national contexts, including England, Ireland, India, South Africa and
imperial Russia. The volume is chronological and extends from the
late-eighteenth century to the present day. Such a diverse range of texts,
periods, and national and cultural contexts indicates just how far it is
possible to employ postcolonial ideas in order to situate or reconsider
the Gothic. This volume also bears testimony to the diverse range of
approaches and readings which may be developed through such a post-
colonial reading of the Gothic.

The volume opens, appropriately, with a study of the earlier phase

of Gothic, and through consideration of two central though under-
explored Gothic-colonial ﬁctions. In ‘Discovering Eastern Horrors:
Beckford, Maturin, and the Discourse of Travel Literature’ (Chapter 1),
Massimiliano Demata explores the inﬂuence of travel writing concern-
ing the East on William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) and Charles Maturin’s
Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Demata argues that travel writing during
this period was inﬂuenced by the kind of empiricism which would
ultimately be employed in shaping Orientalism, whose underlying
hegemonizing strategies objectiﬁed the mysterious and made it safe
according to Western standards. However, both Beckford’s and
Maturin’s writings argue that the ‘reality’ of the East represented in
travel literature could not be easily subjected to Western dominance.
For both writers the sense of horror in travel narratives captures the
European fear of its contact with the Eastern Other. Their adoption
of ‘real’ characters and of stories drawn from travel literature expanded
the essence of horror by literally transplanting the alien, violent and
potentially subversive experiences of the East onto the ‘domestic’ body
of Gothic ﬁction. Demata’s essay thus provides a unique insight into
how the early Gothic both exploits and resists images of Otherness as
part of its potentially subversive critique of Orientalist ideas.

In ‘Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial Moor’ (Chapter 2), Kim Michasiw

examines Charlotte Dacre’s Zoﬂoya; or, The Moor (1806) by locating the
novel’s representation of the title character within the context of the
debates that ultimately led to the abolition of the slave trade in Britain.
The essay examines how Zoﬂoya compares with other literary repre-
sentations of Moors, which consistently suggest that such representa-

Empire and the Gothic

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tions are a response to the traumatic blow dealt to notions of innate
European superiority by the 750-year Moorish colonial enterprise in
Spain. Michasiw argues that Dacre harnesses a number of key, if resid-
ual, stereotypes – the Moor as romance aristocrat unﬁt for modernity,
as corrupted scientist, as connoisseur of chaos – and uses these to chal-
lenge the reigning abolitionist discourse that characterized contem-
porary Africans as simple, pastoral and primitive. He concludes this
important essay by arguing that the novel provides a direct, if danger-
ously ambiguous, challenge to an abolitionism that may only sustain
itself with the prop of the infantalized innocence of Africans.

In ‘Frankenstein and Devi’s Pterodactyl’ (Chapter 3), Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak explores the complex formulation of colonialism in
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) by arguing that the latter is con-
structed out of a speciﬁc English cultural identity which is subtly
reﬂected in the novel. However Frankenstein’s examination of the origins
of society suggests Shelley’s scepticism about dominant models of civi-
lization, and in this way he inaugurates a radical debate about the
nature of humanism. Spivak contrasts Shelley’s version of history
with that of the contemporary writer Mahasweta Devi, who in her tale
‘Pterodactyl, Pirtha and Puran Sahay’ raises questions about pre-history
and whether it can ever be empirically recovered. Vital questions con-
cerning epistemology, history and culture are explored in a ground-
breaking postcolonial reading which the editors have been given
exclusive permission to reprint from The Critique of Postcolonial Reason
(1999).

In ‘Pushkin and Odoevsky: the “Afro-Finnish” Theme in Russian

Gothic’ (Chapter 4), Neil Cornwell argues that Russia fought a colonial
war with Sweden over Finland in the eighteenth century, a war which
coincided with the founding by Peter the Great of the city of St Peters-
burg. Peter the Great, and images of colonial conﬂict, are revisited by
Odoevsky in The Salamander (1841) and by Pushkin in The Blackamoor
of Peter the Great (1827) and this revisiting suggests a desire to reassess
this colonial conﬂict. Cornwell concentrates on the Gothic aspects of
the treatment of colonial-historical themes in these works, and applies
recent studies of colonialism in Russian literature and of the treatment
of history in Pushkin’s ﬁction in order to develop his postcolonial
reading. Cornwell also assesses the ongoing growth of interest in
Pushkin’s ‘Africanism’ and how this relates to his writings. This chapter
makes an important contribution to the understanding of how Russia’s
imperial past was responded to, and renegotiated, by Russian writers
whose own cultural and racial position granted them unique insights.

Introduction

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William Hughes, in ‘A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcolonial-

ity of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ (Chapter 5), reassesses critical claims that
Dracula (1897) represents a fantasy of reverse colonization by focusing
on how the novel develops, and attempts to contain, images of colo-
nial invasion. Hughes notes that in the later parts of the novel there are
attempts to comprehend the Count’s invasive strategy by comparing the
vampire ﬁrst to a fox, and then to that most exotic of colonial beasts,
the tiger. Van Helsing echoes this analogy by depicting the Count as a
‘man-eater, as they of India call the tiger’, yet fails to realize the irony
of his words. For Van Helsing, the anthropocentric man-eater, having
rejected lesser prey, was eternally hungry for the supreme banquet of
human ﬂesh and would ‘prowl unceasing until he got him’. This
analogy exposes the effective invasion script within the novel. The
Count’s apparently systematic invasion is driven by an individual and
carnal appetite which is persistently rendered as a form of cultural,
religious or sexual offensive by those ranged against him. Hughes’s
essay provides a timely reading of how Stoker’s novel is susceptible to
postcolonial criticism, as well as providing an investigation into how
the colonial itself may be mapped over the alternative territory of the
individual – itself a colonial motif.

In ‘Beyond Colonialism: Death and the Body in H. Rider Haggard’

(Chapter 6), Andrew Smith explores Haggard’s cycle of novels concern-
ing Ayesha: She (1888), Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), She and Allan
(1921) and Wisdom’s Daughter (1927). He argues that such novels, far
from being complicit with a language of colonial Othering, demonize
images of colonial tyranny that are implicitly associated with Ayesha.
Conversely, representations of the Western body (such as Holly’s in She)
challenge the idea of a colonial strategy of ‘othering’, a strategy which
recycled images of the primitive drawn from theories of degeneration.
Smith then examines how these novels formulate a complex
metaphorics of death in which the ‘otherworld’ of Africa is substituted
by the ‘other world’ of death and ghostly presences. It is this world
which reﬂects on the decline of empire (the death of dynasties) and on
the meaning of individual death. Smith argues that this move into
metaphysics creates a postcolonial contact zone in which debates relat-
ing to empire, politics, and morality are renegotiated in a way which
unsettles the notion of colonial authority.

Helen Stoddart, in ‘Horror, Circus and Orientalism’ (Chapter 7),

argues that the emergence of the circus in the late eighteenth century
coincided with the beginnings of what Edward Said has referred to as
‘modern Orientalism’. The circus borrowed the colonial impulse to

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travel the world, discovering and exploiting new entertainment
markets, whilst selling itself in the West through constructing specta-
cles out of the trophies of Western expansion. The circus both fetishized
eastern beauty and staged the popular fears of danger and monstrosity
associated with it. Stoddart focuses on a range of popular literary and
ﬁlm texts including The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1963),
Carnival of Souls (1962), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1963), Circus
of Horrors (1960), Nightmare Alley (1947), Freaks (1932) and The Vampire
Circus (1971). Stoddart argues that these texts reveal how the circus
operates along a precarious line between outlawry and custom. It is
this which suggests an alliance with the Gothic whilst simultaneously
offering a unique perspective on orientalist fantasies which are speciﬁc
to this alliance.

In ‘Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)-House: Revolution and

Revelation in Colonial and Postcolonial Female Gothic’ (Chapter 8)
Carol Davison reads Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) as a classic
example of the Female Gothic, one which, problematically, functions
as a mother text to later works of postcolonial Female Gothic ﬁction.
Davison explores the nature and implications of the feminist postcolo-
nial response to Brontë’s novel in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).
She argues that within the Female Gothic (of colonial and postcolonial
varieties) issues of colonial/imperial and sexual politics are often deftly
interwoven in order to illuminate both the sexualized aspects of the
colonial/imperial project and the colonial/imperialistic nature of sexual
politics. In a concluding reading of Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain
(1977) Davison argues that the postcolonial Female Gothic is now an
established genre, despite its apparent adaptability. Davison’s essay thus
provides an important reassessment of the Female Gothic and charts
the emergence of a new form of Gothic writing from which it is
descended. She also emphasizes how issues associated with colonialism
and postcolonialism come to bear on the Female Gothic tradition.

Mariaconcetta Costantini, in ‘Crossing Boundaries: The Revision of

Gothic Paradigms in Heat and Dust’ (Chapter 9), explores Ruth Prawer
Jhabvala’s use of the Gothic in Heat and Dust (1975). She argues that
the novel’s twofold structure reveals how the second narrative, set in
contemporary India, suppresses the Gothic elements of the ﬁrst narra-
tive, set in the 1920s. She argues that the ﬁrst narrative, concerning an
affair between Olivia and the Nawab, constructs the Nawab as a Gothic
villain, one which is ultimately challenged by the manifold contradic-
tions which turn him into a liminal being caught between a British
stereotype of the devilish persecutor and his real-life status as a

Introduction

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mediocre, decadent Indian prince. The second narrative represents the
possibility of moving beyond this world of potential horrors and cele-
brates the possibility of birth and renewal. Costantini’s chapter provides
an important reassessment of the novel as well as illustrating how the
novel debates, within it, the relationship between Gothic and post-
colonial modes of writing.

In ‘The Ghastly and the Ghostly: the Gothic Farce of Farrell’s “Empire

Trilogy” ’ (Chapter 10), Victor Sage examines Farrell’s early (inward-
looking and self-conscious) ﬁction in relation to his imperial trilogy:
Troubles (1970), The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and The Singapore Grip
(1978). Sage explores the connections between these texts and the
Protestant Irish Gothic tradition of Charles Maturin and Sheridan Le
Fanu by comparing the treatment of history and its imperial dimen-
sions. Sage pays close attention to the distinctive features of style in
Farrell’s writings, exploring how ﬁctional self-consciousness and the
self-consciously grotesque disrupts attempts at constructing an ‘objec-
tive’ chronicle of the events. In particular Sage examines how a number
of stylistic features function to alter and introduce irony into the dis-
course of history in a postcolonial way.

David Punter, in ‘Arundhati Roy and the House of History’ (Chapter

11), explores the various images of haunting to be found in Arundhati
Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). He argues that the novel’s main
characters are haunted by the traumatic events of their past; but simi-
larly their environment is haunted more emphatically by the ghosts
of empire. Punter explores the relationship between these images of
empire and the essentially European notion of the Gothic. He examines
how images of ruins both represent the past and yet also, in the novel,
pose a fatal attraction for the present. The very ‘post’ in postcolonial
here represents the inability of living in the ruins, or the colonial after-
math; and thus the narrative of the novel constructs itself not around
a linear retelling of the past but around a traumatized evasion of that
past, involving a continuing Gothic loss of coherence, a constant inabil-
ity to avoid returning to the scene of an ineradicable crime. Punter is
one of the most inﬂuential critics working on the Gothic and this essay
also reﬂects his more recent interest in postcolonialism.

In ‘The Number of Magic Alternatives: Salman Rushdie’s 1001 Gothic

Nights’ (Chapter 12), Andrew Teverson explores the impact of The
Arabian Nights on a Gothic Orientalist tradition. He argues that
Rushdie’s sampling of this tradition does not, as some critics have
argued, simply reinscribe Orientalist preconceptions of the ‘East’, but
rather enables him to use the tales for a postcolonial agenda. Teverson

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argues that Rushdie uses The Arabian Nights as an example of a hybrid
narrative collection of tales within tales within tales, rather than as an
exclusive and homogenized narrative body. Teverson thus constructs an
original reading of Rushdie which locates him in relation to this Ori-
entalist Gothic tradition, a reading which has so far been overlooked by
critics both of the Gothic and postcolonialism.

Dominic Head, in ‘Coetzee and the Animals: the Quest for Post-

colonial Grace’ (Chapter 13), traces the development of J.M. Coetzee’s
ethical vision, and in particular that dynamic which suggests that the
fear of the Other might be translated into care and compassion.
Coetzee’s groundbreaking second Booker Prize-winner, Disgrace (1999),
is considered as a possible culmination of this development. This novel
is situated at the nexus of the postcolonial, the Gothic, and the eco-
critical and it contests the anodyne version of post-apartheid South
Africa (the so-called ‘rainbow nation’), evoking a nightmare of fear and
transgression instead. A way out of the circle of terror, and the bleak
new postcolonial tyranny that is depicted, is implied in the novel’s
moral philosophy. Head draws on Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999),
and its concern with animal rights in order to show how the ethical
vision of Disgrace offers another kind of transgression to received ideas
about ethics and politics. Head’s essay thus brings together Gothic
notions of transgression with the postcolonial in order to construct an
important reassessment of post-apartheid South Africa.

With the exception of Spivak’s landmark essay, all of the essays in this

volume have been specially commissioned for this volume. The diver-
sity of views, texts, contexts and histories examined here bear testimony
to the rich and highly complex relationship which exists between the
Gothic and theories of postcolonialism. It is hoped that such diversity
will stimulate debate over what is in effect a new and exciting area of
intellectual enquiry.

Notes

1. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 30.

2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences

([1970], London: Tavistock, 1982), pp. 303–40.

3. Ghandi, Postcolonial Theory, p. 39.
4. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: The Gothic Tradition, 2 vols, Vol. 1

(London and New York: Longman, 1996), p. 24.

5. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in Art and Literature: Jensen’s Gradiva,

Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works, trans. J. Strachey, ed. A. Dickson
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

Introduction

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6. Michael Franklin, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook to Gothic

Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press [now Palgrave Macmillan], 1998),
pp. 21 and 170.

7. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient ([1978]

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).

8. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism

1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988).

9. Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-

Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 253.

10. Ibid., p. 165.
11. H.L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 231; Ken Gelder, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’
in Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook to Gothic Literature, pp. 180–1.

12. Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 122, cf.

p. 123.

13. Alexandra Warwick, ‘Colonial Gothic’ in Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook

to Gothic Literature, pp. 261–2, at p. 262.

14. Alongside these generic explorations it is also important to acknowledge that

there has also been some signiﬁcant work on speciﬁc authors which has
explored how the Gothic and ideas of Orientalism relate to each
other, a link suggested by B.J. Moore-Gilbert in Kipling and ‘Orientalism’
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). In addition Peter Morey’s recent
essay on Kipling in Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, eds, Victorian Gothic:
Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2001), pp. 201–17, relates the Gothic to the images of imperialism
in Kipling, arguing that images of Gothic instability enable us to
critically re-read the status and function of imperialism in Kipling’s
narratives.

15. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History

of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp.
132–46.

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Discovering Eastern Horrors:
Beckford, Maturin and the
Discourse of Travel Literature

Massimiliano Demata

For correctness of costume, beauty of description, and power
of imagination, [Vathek] far surpasses all European imitations;
and bears such marks of originality, that those who have visited
the East will ﬁnd some difﬁculty in believing it to be more than
a translation.

Lord Byron, note to The Giaour (1813).

I have often thought in writing my wild tales (whose only merit
in my eyes is that they had the good fortune to please you) that
life supplied examples of vicissitude enough to make the
romance-writer ﬂing down his pen in despair – some of these
I have experienced, and one I have lately witnessed which, if
my heart be allowed to be a judge, transcends them all.

Charles Maturin, letter to Walter Scott, 5 January 1820.

The ﬁrst of the two passages quoted above, a famous section of Byron’s
note to The Giaour, indicates an important aspect of William Beckford’s
Vathek (1786). In his praise of the work, Byron implicitly underlines the
importance of ‘realism’ in the handling of certain materials and sources
as a criterion for the evaluation of literature. Indeed, Byron held
literary ‘correctness’ in such importance that in 1817, in a letter to John
Murray, he wrote that

I hate things all ﬁction & therefore the Merchant & Othello – have no
great associations to me – but Pierre has – there should always be
some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric – and pure inven-
tion is but the talent of a liar.

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Byron emphasized what was for him a crucial aspect of literature: its
adherence to fact and ‘truth’ even in its wildest inventions of ﬁction.
Unlike Beckford, Byron knew the ‘facts’ of the East by having travelled
there in 1809–11, but Beckford’s picture of oriental customs and culture,
derived from secondary sources, struck him as authentic and genuine.
According to Byron, Beckford had to be praised because he engaged with
‘real’ characters and events and, accordingly, offered a picture of the
East which was reliable and credible even though it was presented in
the usual escapist narrative conventions of a tale.

Writing more than three decades after the appearance of Vathek, and

possibly when he was about to complete his masterpiece, Melmoth
the Wanderer (1820), Charles Maturin faced an altogether different kind
of problem. Indeed, the issue of ‘facts’ raised by Byron would have
sounded to him misleading, or, at best, something of an understate-
ment. In his letter to Scott, the Irish writer argued that the resources of
fancy were completely exhausted because ‘life’ presented ‘vicissitudes’
whose horrendous nature went beyond anything an author could
conceive in writing ‘tales’, no matter how ‘wild’. As a consequence, in
Melmoth the Wanderer Maturin engages with real-life events, which are
enfolded in the usually escapist narrative space of a tale. The novel was
indeed written from quite a different perspective from that of Beckford.
Maturin had found momentary popularity with his drama Bertram in
1816, but constantly faced ﬁnancial hardship and the misery of living,
as he often complained in his few extant letters, in a culturally and
socially deprived context.

When one looks at the personalities and careers of Beckford and

Maturin, there could not be two more different writers: an ante-litteram
English dandy, whose fame for his extraordinary erudition was accom-
panied by a scandalous private life, has very little in common with an
Irish clergyman, who constantly struggled to earn a living, let alone
literary recognition. Yet, afﬁnities between the two writers, whose
works appeared just at the beginning and at the end of the lineage of
the ‘classic’ Gothic novel, are as remarkable as their differences. The
two protagonists of the novels, the Caliph Vathek and the Faustian
wanderer John Melmoth, share the physical and psychological nature
of the Gothic villain in that both are over-reaching, satanic characters
in pursuit of a forbidden knowledge which will also be the cause of their
tragic end.

Even more importantly, Beckford and Maturin share a similar concern

with the shifting relationship between fact and ﬁction, and in particu-
lar with the ‘facts’ offered by travel literature and other works on the

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East. The two writers did not employ the oriental ‘other’ as a narrative
decoration or to create an aura of exotic interest, but rather as a real,
tangible presence which somehow strengthened, and was a founding
element of, the horror content of their narratives. Both writers contin-
uously referred to documents and sources on what was, for themselves
and their readers, a real Orient, devoid of the fancy and improbability
of the Arabian Nights or of legends without basis in fact; it was an
Orient whose mixture of beauty and horror could be described and
presented to the Western reader through references to works written
by those who had a thorough knowledge of it by having visited and
studied it.

This chapter discusses the place of Vathek and Melmoth the Wanderer

in the context of the contemporary Orientalist and imperialistic pro-
jects, and particularly the implications of the presence of concrete, non-
ﬁctional elements, mainly deriving from travel books, within a context
whose traditional narrative basis was grounded in ‘ﬁction’. Beckford
and Maturin did much more than decorate their ‘tales’ with Oriental
materials to lend reality to otherwise ﬁctitious stories. They employed
travel literature and other works of a scientiﬁc nature to legitimize their
narratives, or, in other words, to make them seem real and concrete,
with the effect that readers recognize elements of ‘reality’ within a ﬁc-
tional context. The effect is that in both Vathek and Melmoth the Wan-
derer the readers’ perspective is thrown back onto a reality which is not
the reassuring narrative space of a ‘tale’ but rather the looming, often
threatening presence of a real ‘other’.

The picture of the East presented by Beckford in Vathek revealed to
late-eighteenth-century readers a world which was still obscure or, at
best, the domain of ﬁctitious or semi-legendary notions. Commercial
interests, particularly after Pitt’s India Act of 1784, were driving Britain
towards a much more direct involvement in Indian affairs. However,
before William Jones’s foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in
1784 there was little or no real knowledge of Indian culture. Similarly,
in Beckford’s time, general interest in the Near and Middle East, the
main geographical and cultural background of Vathek, was negligible at
worst, circumstantial at best. British foreign policy had traditionally
devoted little or no attention to the Near East. Diplomatic relationships
with the Ottoman Empire, which included modern-day Turkey, Syria,
Iraq and Egypt, were neglected to such an extent that the reports sent
periodically to London by the British Embassy at Constantinople were
never read.

During the eighteenth century, the activities of the Levant

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Company, the chartered body of British merchants who lived and
worked in the Ottoman Empire, were in steep decline.

Furthermore,

very few British travellers visited the still very dangerous Ottoman
provinces, and as a consequence, the number of English works about
these regions was negligible. In Beckford’s time the two most reliable
‘scientiﬁc’ works on the Near East written by English authors were still
Richard Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), which even Byron
and Southey would later read, and Paul Rycaut’s The Present State of the
Ottoman Empire (1667). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Embassy Letters’
(written 1717–18, but ﬁrst published in 1763), the translation of the
Arabian Nights (1705–8) and the numerous Oriental or pseudo-Oriental
tales which descended from it still provided readers with the only avail-
able literary and (seemingly) authentic descriptions of Islamic culture,
religion and society.

According to Roger Lonsdale, Vathek, with its learned account of

Eastern manners, culture and religion, paved the way for British ac-
ademic – and, later, commercial – interest in the East.

When Vathek ﬁrst

appeared in print in 1786, it was originally advertised as ‘The History
of Caliph Vathek. An Arabian Tale from an Unpublished Manuscript
with Notes Critical and Explanatory’.

The Oriental imagery of

Beckford’s work was so convincing that many at the time believed that
it was a translation from an Arabic original.

Indeed, in the eyes of con-

temporary readers and reviewers, Vathek stood out as a unique literary
artefact. With its subtitle – ‘An Oriental Tale’ – Beckford’s work was
immediately placed within the tradition started by the Arabian Nights,
but most critics also pointed out the innovations it brought to that tra-
dition. More than any other previous Oriental or pseudo-Oriental tale,
Vathek’s strength lay in its realistic picture of Oriental society, a picture
whose accuracy and credibility did not originate in the text of the novel
alone, but mainly in its extensive and extraordinarily complex notes.
These notes were compiled by Samuel Henley, a renowned scholar with
a thorough knowledge of Arabic and Persian languages who had earlier
encouraged Beckford’s own interest in Oriental cultures. It was indeed
Henley who ﬁrst suggested to Beckford the idea of substantiating the
events and costumes described in Vathek with some learned commen-
tary. Their frequent correspondence during the painstaking work of
annotating and translating Beckford’s work from French into English
reveals how carefully and scrupulously Beckford worked to enrich the
picture of the Caliph’s adventures with the evidence provided by the
most reliable sources of knowledge of Oriental culture, including John
Richardson’s Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of the

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Eastern Nations (1772) and Barthémy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale
(1697).

The notes followed the text of the tale of Vathek and ﬁlled one-third

of the 1786 edition. In their learned depiction of Eastern culture and
religion, the importance of the notes nearly outweighed the interest
aroused by the ﬁction of the tale of the Caliph, to the extent that the
Gentleman’s Magazine suggested that the tale had been ‘composed as a
text for the purpose of giving to the publick the information contained
in the notes.’

Modern criticism has continued to consider the unique

character of Vathek as dependent on its interplay of romance and real-
istic picture of Oriental customs. In this sense, Martha Pike Conant’s
discussion of Vathek as the best example of the ‘imaginative’ Oriental
tale, which, following the example of the Arabian Nights, combined
mystery and magic with a sense of reality and verisimilitude, has
become canonical and has continued to inﬂuence more recent readings
of Beckford’s work.

The plot itself provided Beckford and Henley with the opportunity of

displaying their great knowledge of Oriental geography, culture, religion
and political institutions. In the volume of Vathek, the tale is followed
by the notes; in other words, the work is presented in such a manner
that the ﬁctional level (the history of the Caliph) is kept physically sep-
arate from the learned account in the notes. However, these two levels
overlap and are often confused, as the ‘ﬁction’ of the tale is constantly
directed to, and explained by, the notes.

The notes to the text of Vathek often add a sinister dimension to the

plot by allowing the reader to approach ‘real’ events or characters
beyond the surface of the ‘ﬁctional’ level. Perhaps the most signiﬁcant
example of the use of historically based sources is the account of the
character of the Caliph himself. The description of the physical and
moral attributes of Vathek takes up the opening two pages of the 1786
edition. There is indeed an air of immediacy and matter-of-factness
in the ﬁgure of the Caliph: the notes scrupulously discuss his unusual
features and the exotic locations related to his own life, while the
etymology of the word ‘Caliph’ is explained by referring to Habesci’s
The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1784) and d’Herbelot’s Biblio-
thèque Orientale. A note on Vathek’s notoriously frightening gaze
covertly refers again to a section of d’Herbelot’s work and comments
that ‘The author of Nighiaristan hath preserved a fact that supports this
account; and there is no history of Vathek, in which his terrible eye is
not mentioned’ (p. 123).

In other words, readers are asked to believe

that the author of the notes is certain that Vathek did indeed have

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terrible eyes, and actual historical evidence validates this. The mention
in the text of Caliph Omar Ben Abdalaziz, from whose restrained
philosophy of pleasure Vathek differs so much, is again immediately
elaborated in the notes by the portrait of a ﬁgure who really existed and
is discussed as a real person in the Bibliothèque Orientale. Alkoremi,
the palace that Vathek inherits from his father and that he has enlarged,
overlooks the city of Samarah, which was, as a note tells us, ‘a city of
the Babylonian Irak’ (p. 124), a real place whose history is again derived
from d’Herbelot’s work.

In this interplay of fact and ﬁction there exists a sense of spatial and

temporal distance: Vathek’s story is set in a context which few readers
could experience at ﬁrst hand. However, very often Beckford pushes the
boundaries of the ‘other’ into a historical and cultural frame which is
much closer to that of the readers. An instance of this is the Giaour’s
appearance at Vathek’s court and the marvellous gifts he brings to the
monarch (pp. 5–6). This episode is substantiated by its recalling actual
historical facts. As a note to this episode points out (p. 126):

That such curiosities were much sought after in the days of Vathek,
may be concluded from the encouragement which Haroun al Raschid
gave to the mechanic arts, and the present he sent, by his ambas-
sadors, to Charlemagne. This consisted of a clock, which, when put
into motion, by means of a clepsydra, not only pointed out the
hours, but also, by dropping small balls on a bell, struck them; and,
at the same instant, threw open as many little doors, to let out an
equal number of horsemen.

Here the intersection of text and notes, reality and ﬁction, has subtler
implications: the gifts brought by the Giaour to the Caliph – slippers
which enable the feet to walk, knives which move without human inter-
vention – may be part of the fantasy world of Vathek, but the effect of
their miraculous workings are no less remarkable than those seemingly
magic objects brought by the Saracen embassy to the court of
Charlemagne. The movement from the text to its note brings about a
reversal and confusion of the West-East opposition: Charlemagne the
Christian and Vathek the Muslim are both visited by strangers from
seemingly more advanced stages of civilization who brought to them
artefacts which caused disruption: Muslims in Charlemagne’s case, a
‘Giaour’, that is, a non-Muslim and an ‘inﬁdel’ from India, in that of
Vathek (signiﬁcantly, ‘Giaour’ was an appellation which, in Western
literature on the Orient, usually referred to the Muslim deﬁnition of

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Christians and Europeans). Vathek succumbs to the Giaour’s tempta-
tion, repudiates Islam and eventually causes his own ruin, while the
technological superiority of the Arab world in the Middle Ages led
Europe and Christendom to the brink of destruction – and of conver-
sion to Islam.

Beckford seemed to have felt a predilection for the power of certain

exotic or unknown objects. The acts of witchcraft performed by
Carathis, Vathek’s mother, in the enclosed, claustrophobic space of a
typically Gothic environment, in order to ingratiate herself with the
demonic powers, reveal a side of ‘magic’ whose very tangible implica-
tions go beyond a grotesque exhibition of the fantastic:

By secret stairs, contrived within the thickness of the wall, and
known only to herself and her son, she ﬁrst repaired to the mysteri-
ous recesses in which were deposited the mummies that had been
wrested from the catacombs of the ancient Pharaohs. Of these she
ordered several to be taken. From thence she resorted to a gallery;
where, under the guard of ﬁfty female negroes mute and blind of
the right eye, were preserved the oil of the most venomous serpents;
rhinoceros’ horns; and woods of a subtile and penetrating odour,
procured from the interior of the Indies.

(pp. 30–1)

Here Beckford is presenting a catalogue of objects which were no doubt
familiar to Western travellers, collectors and archaeologists. A note on
‘mummies’ warns readers that they do indeed exist, and ‘are frequently
found in the sepulchres of Egypt’ (p. 129). It may be said that Beckford
reverses Belinda’s luxurious toiletry in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock
(1712/14): the ‘unnumbered treasures’ and ‘India’s glowing gems’ (I,
129, 133) adorning Belinda’s beauty as a sort of colonial trophy are
replaced by poisons and other deadly essences, while instead of ‘The
tortoise here and elephant unite, / Transformed to combs, the speckled,
and the white’ (I, 135–6), Carathis uses ‘rhinoceros’ horns’ to effect
magical transformations.

The mysterious qualities of these objects

‘procured from the interior of the Indies’ indicate, to Beckford’s readers,
that those distant countries which were entering Britain’s commercial
and colonial domination could disclose threatening secrets.

The bordering of the known with the unknown occurs very frequently

in Vathek. The dark spaces and unexplored geographical areas ex-
perienced by the characters of Vathek are not distant from the readers’
own perception of the Orient as a threatening dark space which, in

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Beckford’s time, could be glimpsed occasionally and with great difﬁ-
culty, and could therefore become a source of anxiety. Beckford’s whole
narrative strategy produces this effect on more than one occasion. While
travelling in pursuit of the wealth promised by the Giaour, the royal
procession loses its way in the middle of a storm at night and is threat-
ened by ‘wild beasts’:

there were soon perceived in the forest they were skirting, the glaring
of eyes, which could belong only to devils or tigers. The pioneers,
who, as well as they could, had marked out a track; and a part of the
advanced guard, were devoured, before they had been in the least
apprized of their danger. The confusion that prevailed was extreme.
Wolves, tigers, and other carnivorous animals, invited by the
howling of their companions, ﬂocked together from every quarter.
The crashing of bones was heard on all sides, and a fearful rush of
wings over head; for now vultures also began to be of the party.

(pp. 45–6)

Vathek is unable to react to this dreadful occurrence and Bababalouk,
the chief of Vathek’s eunuchs, orders ﬁres to be lit immediately in order
to keep the beasts away. ‘Ten thousand torches were lit at once’, and,
as recalled by the corresponding note, this stratagem was related by
William Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783) as being actually used by
local populations to frighten tigers (p. 135). When as a consequence of
the torches’ ﬁre a forest near Vathek’s procession catches ﬁre, Beckford
immediately refers this event from the tale to a real fact, and a note
argues that ‘Accidents of this kind, in Persia, are not unfrequent’ (p.
136), a statement followed by a passage from Richardson’s Dissertation,
in which such occurrences are described as being caused by ‘kings and
great men’.

There is much in the key passages discussed above which pulls Vathek

in the direction of the Gothic. While Beckford’s novel lacks the whole
array of Gothic paraphernalia, such as medieval Catholic settings or
haunted castles, certain psychological and narrative implications place
Vathek within the same tradition of Gothic ﬁction begun by the novels
of Walpole and Reeve. Beckford often uses dark, enclosed and claustro-
phobic spaces, while his attention to magic and necromancy would
soon become stereotypes of the novel of horror. Frederick S. Frank has
shown the limitations of a deﬁnition of Vathek as merely an ‘Oriental
tale’. He has convincingly traced a number of elements in Beckford’s
work which are consistent with the terror motifs which had been in-

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troduced by Walpole and Reeve and which would be developed by
Radcliffe and Lewis.

In particular, Frank has related a key text of

Gothic aesthetics, Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s ‘On the Pleasure Derived
from Objects of Terror’ (1773), to Beckford’s horror ﬁction and particu-
larly to the character of the Caliph himself, who is overwhelmed by a
perverse ‘otherness’ as a result of his unholy and tragic quests.

Frank’s

argument is convincing but rather limited, as it does not take into
account the fuller implications of Barbauld’s argument and, particularly,
her emphasis on the effects of the ‘objects of terror’. Barbauld’s discourse
on the psychological effects of the ‘objects of terror’ refers both to real
life and to the act of reading itself. In particular, she reﬂects on the
balance between pain and pleasure caused by certain events, both in
real life and in ﬁction, and on ‘the pleasure constantly attached to the
excitement of surprise from new and wonderful objects’:

A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on
the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced,
of ‘forms unseen, and mightier far than we,’ our imagination, darting
forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its
view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy
co-operating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of
terror is lost in amazement.

This is certainly the case with Vathek’s frantic quest for the treasures
of the pre-Adamite sultans. Furthermore, Barbauld mentions ‘Oriental
Tales’ as a genre on more than one occasion and refers to the par-
ticular amazement that readers draw from the descriptions of fantastic
realities contained in them. However, while she stresses the ﬁctitious
and fantastic nature of such ﬁctions as the Arabian Nights, she also adds
that

the more wild, fanciful, and extraordinary are the circumstances of
a scene of horror, the more pleasure we receive from it; and where
they are too near common nature, though violently borne by curiosity
through the adventure, we cannot repeat it or reﬂect on it, without
an over-balance of pain.

Within a ‘tale’, these ‘circumstances of a scene of horror’ which happen
to be ‘too near common nature’ derive from their proximity to common
occurrences or natural events. The fantastic elements of Vathek are inter-
mingled with frequent references to real-life events, places or characters

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– the ‘common nature’ of so many aspects of the Eastern reality por-
trayed by Beckford. Crucially, therefore, Barbauld’s text shows how
Beckford’s use of Oriental elements is consistent with the literary and
aesthetic tenets of the Gothic, and in particular with those narrative ele-
ments which showed how within human experience the ‘domestic’
could be in close proximity to the ‘alien’.

A Gothic reading of Vathek must therefore take into account the actual

import of its Eastern elements. Indeed, within the perspective of recent
discussion of ‘orientalism’, the authenticity of Beckford’s picture of ori-
ental society has often come under attack from those who have empha-
sized Beckford’s mostly antiquarian and second-hand knowledge of
the East. Having never travelled to those countries described in his
tale, Beckford delved into his personal library and drew from it most of
the materials on which his imagination worked to create Vathek. These
materials, ordered in Henley’s notes, presented a picture of Oriental
society which, according to modern criticism, is intrinsically false or, at
best, the result of works which effectively operated a mediation between
Beckford and a ‘visible’ but ultimately unknowable (by Beckford) East.

A work such as d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale, Beckford’s own
favourite, is, after Edward Said’s analysis, now discredited as an example
of Orientalism because it belonged to a class of texts which expressed
the West’s attempt to dominate the East and to present it in a way which
has no direct relationship to a ‘real’ geographical, social and cultural
entity. According to Said, d’Herbelot’s picture of the East, for all its
catalogue of data, historical and geographical facts, customs, traditions
and religious rites, ‘did not attempt to revise commonly received ideas
about the Orient. For what the Orientalist does is to conﬁrm the Orient
in his reader’s eyes; he neither tries nor wants to unsettle already ﬁrm
convictions.’

While in terms of absolute authenticity the intrinsic weakness of

the sources used by Beckford and Henley cannot be denied according
to today’s standards, these sources represented the only modern and
reliable information on the East available to readers and writers at the
time. If in the 1780s a stereotype of the East already existed, it was a
fragmented one based on a limited number of works (and on an even
smaller number if one should want to deﬁne an ‘English-born’ stereo-
type) and on an image of the East which, as Beckford fully realized, was
scientiﬁcally inadequate or weak. A Saidian critique of Vathek can be
(and has been) used to show Beckford’s quiescent, if somewhat unset-
tling, consent to the dominating Western approach to the East, but tells
us very little of the actual import and reception of Beckford’s erudition

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and of Vathek’s ‘realism’ in the context of late-eighteenth-century
ﬁction, and, even more importantly, cannot explain the meaning of the
novel as a horror story taking up elements placed geographically and
culturally in a position of ‘otherness’.

The statement by Byron which

opened the present chapter can be understood in view of Beckford’s
disclosure of what he thought his readers should perceive as the real
Orient.

By assuming this, one is thus able to see the full meaning of

Beckford’s attempt to create in Vathek a narrative space in which the
‘tale’ is intruded upon by elements of ‘reality’, a narrative space which
discloses to readers the dangerous proximity and closeness of the alien
presence of the Oriental ‘other’.

The way Beckford handles his materials and places them within his

tale reveals a complex strategy in which domestic and alien, real and
ﬁctitious, familiar and unfamiliar converge and mingle. In Vathek, the
East is posited in terms of a mysterious dark space of which we can
only glimpse fractured or partial images through the works written by
Western explorers or historians. The East is a vacuum which is begin-
ning to be ﬁlled by such works as Vathek, an ‘other’ which is resistant
to the West’s ‘rational’ understanding but whose knowability depended
on structures of thought which projected an aura of sinister and tangi-
ble immediacy. In Vathek Beckford often seems to dramatize the hesi-
tating, stammering and unsettled voice of the West facing the ‘beyond’
of the East, an unknown domain which can only be represented as
fragmented and obscure.

Beckford and Henley’s use of their ‘scientiﬁc’ sources attempts to place

the mysteries of the East within an experiential space available to all
readers. However, the sense of otherness projected by Vathek, negotiated
through Beckford’s erudite representation of the East through his
sources, does not manage to project a fully reassuring sense of distance
and alterity from the West. As a true Orientalist, Beckford inscribes the
language of the West into the East. At the same time, however, the East
resurfaces into the West in shapes which are the domain of the uncanny.
The familiar and orderly remembrance of Charlemagne is compared to
(and threatened by) Vathek’s Eastern tyranny and horriﬁc actions. The
East is presented as an unhomely presence in the domestic space of the
West and is potentially suffocating and horriﬁc because it is open to any
interpretation.

Vathek opens up a space of interaction between East and West which

cannot be simply conceived as part of Said’s formulation of colonial
discourse as an apparatus of power, consciously deﬁning and reducing
marginalities and ‘othernesses’ as products of the Western Eurocentric

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hegemony. If anything, Vathek enacts the difﬁculties in understanding
the ‘other’ – the ‘other’ from the West’s own senses and reason, which
cannot fully comprehend the encoded and obscure geographical and
cultural language of the East, but also the ‘other’ from the ‘other’ itself,
the ‘other’ from the Caliph Vathek, who cannot decipher the inscrip-
tions of the Giaour’s sabre and is pushed to overreach the boundaries
of his own being by entering unknown regions and consequently facing
Eblis (and a strangely Christian punishment for a tale set in the East!).

Vathek’s own identity is precariously constructed since it cannot be
entirely defamiliarized and made ‘other’ from the West: Carathis, his
mother, is Greek and he is therefore already a visible product of cultural
miscegenation. In order to understand the world outside himself, the
Caliph needs to construct a new identity, losing his own Muslim faith
and becoming fully himself an ‘other’, a Giaour, an inﬁdel. In other
words, as a (potentially) colonized, and, at the same time, in his own
way, a colonizer, Vathek’s own identity is reshaped and violated accord-
ing to the external pressures of the ‘outside’, or the ‘beyond’.

Unlike Beckford, Maturin could not and did not call himself an ‘Ori-
entalist’. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he was certainly an
omnivorous reader, but his expertise on Oriental culture and languages
was much narrower than Beckford’s. Certainly Melmoth the Wanderer
cannot be deﬁned an ‘Oriental Tale’ in the same mould as that of Beck-
ford or his French predecessors. Maturin came after, and was inﬂuenced
by, the works of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Unlike Vathek,
Maturin’s novel does not present imaginary adventures in exotic lands,
neither is it instrumental in giving an exhaustive and learned picture
of Oriental manners. Oriental motifs are present, however, in both the
structure and theme of Melmoth the Wanderer. While Vathek was, as its
subtitle implied, an ‘Oriental Tale’, the working title of Melmoth the
Wanderer was ‘Tales’. The novel is therefore shaped along a narrative
medium with very deﬁnite connotations: like the Arabian Nights or the
collection of Oriental tales copying their scheme, Melmoth the Wanderer
consists of a series of ‘Tales’ with a tenuous unifying link: the Faust-like
protagonist John Melmoth, who is very often absent from the narra-
tion.

The narration shifts from Ireland to Spain, England and the

Indian Ocean within a very broad chronological range and is presented
in a much more fragmentary manner than the plot of Beckford’s work.

The clearest indication of Maturin’s Orientalism can be found in the

‘Tale of the Indians’, which, according to Heinz Kosok, is ‘one of the
ﬁercest attacks on colonialism anywhere to be found in nineteenth

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century literature.’

This tale alludes to the destructive effects of

Europeanization through the events of the life of Immalee, a Spanish
woman who lived as an innocent bon sauvage on a remote Indian island
ever since a shipwreck left her there while still an infant. Immalee para-
doxically embraces Christianity despite Melmoth’s disparaging descrip-
tions of it. She falls in love with the Wanderer himself and is eventually
found and brought back to native Europe, where, in a typical act of colo-
nial (re)naming, she reverts to her old name and is rechristened as
Isidora, only to die in a prison of the Inquisition after giving birth to
her and Melmoth’s child.

The Oriental, or non-European, also surfaces

in a series of references to real-life events which Maturin takes from
travel literature and other works on distant regions of the globe. Simi-
larly to Vathek, the use of travel literature in the footnotes of Melmoth
the Wanderer leads the reader to view the ‘ﬁction’ of the tales within a
disturbing and tangible aura of reality.

The few passages in Melmoth

which direct the reader’s attention to the authority of certain travel
books show not only that Maturin had learned Beckford’s lesson very
well, but also that he could handle the ‘real’ scenes offered by his sources
more radically than his predecessor. In his use of travel literature,
Maturin uses an encoded language in which a very radical critique of
European colonialism foreshadows his own troubled sense of Irishness.

Of all the tales of Melmoth, the ‘Tale of the Spaniard’, related by

Alonzo Monçada, who becomes a priest against his will, following his
parents’ vows, is the one which most clearly delves into more conven-
tional Gothic elements.

The story of Monçada’s long stay in a Spanish

convent and his escape from it is dotted with a series of gruesome
episodes. In one of them, two newly ordained priests are often seen in
a suspiciously intimate friendship. The authorities of the convent spy
upon them and it is soon discovered that the pair are actually husband
and wife, and the only way for them to meet and live together was for
her to join the order as a novice. When the Superior, aided by Monçada
himself, ﬁnds out the truth and sees the young couple embracing each
other, the shock is great and can only be compared by Monçada to
something altogether inhuman:

Here I must do the Superior reluctant justice. He was a man (of course
from his conventual feelings) who had no more idea of the inter-
course between the sexes, than between two beings of a different
species. The scene that he beheld could not have revolted him more,
than if he had seen the horrible loves of the baboons and the
Hottentot women, at the Cape of Good Hope; or those still more

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loathsome unions between the serpents of South America and their
human victims, when they catch them, and twine round them in
folds of unnatural and ineffable union.

(p. 207)

Maturin’s perspective is obviously anti-Catholic: only in a Spanish
convent could the most natural union, that between a man and a
woman, be considered sacrilegious, unnatural and even beastly. Yet,
there are even subtler implications. In order to characterize fully the
moral darkness of those who live in a certain environment, Maturin
compares the Superior’s thoughts to scenes of lurid strangeness: for him,
the sight of husband and wife together is as ‘unnatural’ as the union
between women and baboons in South Africa, or as the mortal embrace
between snakes and their victims in South America.

Maturin thus

suggests that the distance between the readers’ values and those of the
convent is no less than that between Europe and the southern hemi-
sphere (and there is indeed a good dose of macabre irony on Maturin’s
part in inserting a reference to the Cape of Good Hope in a context
which for Monçada was devoid of any).

The crudity of the scene is referred to by Maturin as coming from a

speciﬁc source. The footnote to ‘human victims’ tells the reader: ‘Vide
Charlevoix’s History of Paraguay’. The reference is to Pierre François
Xavier de Charlevoix, whose History of Paraguay, ﬁrst published in
French in 1756, was translated into English in 1769. Maturin is here
using a source which had a certain scientiﬁc legitimacy: Charlevoix was
a French Jesuit missionary (and therefore, implicitly, an instrument of
colonialism himself) who had travelled to North America between 1719
and 1729. His most popular work, Histoire et description générale de la
Nouvelle France (1744), offered new information on the indigenous
populations and its impact and reputation were such that it was used
by Adam Ferguson in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and
William Robertson in History of the Reign of Charles V (1769). The evi-
dence collected by Charlevoix was indeed extremely important for
the Scottish philosophers as it provided them with useful indications
in their analysis of the evolution of mankind through different stages
of civilization.

Yet, Maturin does not use the work which Charlevoix is most famous

for. Instead, he draws from the less well-known History of Paraguay. The
History was very different from Charlevoix’s earlier book on North
America, as it mainly consisted of a detailed chronicle of the discovery
and conquest of Paraguay from 1516 up to Charlevoix’s time; it was a

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‘history’ in the fully colonial sense of the word, as it only begins when
Paraguay was ﬁrst ‘discovered’ by the Spanish and thus ignores its
‘pre-European’, indigenous history. The only information on the natives
and their environment contained in the two volumes of the work is in
the ﬁrst 27 pages of the ﬁrst volume; it is from this short section that
Maturin drew the passage which he used for the episode of the husband
and wife surprised in the convent. In his outline of the animal world
of Paraguay, Charlevoix describes the dangers posed by the reptiles
which can be found in that region. He relates two deadly encounters of
large water snakes with humans. In the ﬁrst of them,

an Indian of the tallest stature, who happened to be ﬁshing up to his
middle in water, [was] swallowed alive by a huge snake, which the
next day vomited his prey ashore quite whole, all to the bones which
were smashed to pieces, as if they had been bruised between two
mill-stones.

This is followed by a similarly horrid episode, related to Charlevoix by
one Father Montoya, who

was one day called upon to hear the confession of an Indian woman,
whom, while she was washing some linen on the banks of a river,
one of these animals attacked, and, as she said, offered violence to
her: the missionary found her stretched on the very spot, where she
said the thing had happened; she told him she was sure she had but
a few minutes to live, and in fact expired almost as soon as she had
ﬁnish’d her confession.

In the second passage, the English translation of the snake’s actions has
a degree of linguistic ambiguity which the French original somehow
lacks: the snake ‘offered violence’ to the Indian woman but this seems
to allude to a violent sexual union between a snake and a woman.

both episodes, the snake has come out victorious from its struggle for
food, but the embrace has inevitably been fatal for its victim. Their
‘union’ can never fully take place because of the total incompatibility
between the snake and its victim, who can neither be digested nor
made pregnant. It is such incompatibility, this ‘unnatural and ineffable
union’, that Maturin reproduces in his picture of the Superior’s reaction
to the view of husband and wife together.

The episode in Melmoth the Wanderer and its source reveal Maturin’s

anxiety over the colonial enterprise. Charlevoix, the unnamed traveller

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to the Cape of Good Hope and Monçada had all travelled and reported
to Europe the horrors they witnessed: Charlevoix published written
accounts of his travels to America once he got back to Europe, while
Monçada escaped from Spain to Ireland to narrate his ‘Tale’ to the young
John Melmoth. Maturin seeks to convey to his readers the effect pro-
duced by the scene on the Superior, and warns them that the unnatural
‘unions’ witnessed and described by those who have visited the Cape
of Good Hope and Paraguay do take place and can be reproduced in
Spain, much closer to home. Through Monçada’s report, Maturin
thrusts the monstrous strangeness of the woman-baboon and snake-
victim unions inside the space of a novel set in a Catholic country, a
familiar setting for Gothic novel readers but also one resembling
Ireland. In their explorations, Charlevoix and the travellers to the Cape
of Good Hope have revealed and reported a shocking vision of human
life, a ‘heart of darkness’ which is no longer uncharted territory for the
West but which the West, by conquering it, has also absorbed in all its
obscure and often horrid aspects. Paraguay was, after all, a Spanish
colony, the Cape of Good Hope was under British control, while in
Spain itself men and women were kept under the brutal tyranny of the
Inquisition.

Another event, Monçada’s taking the holy orders, is again presented

in terms of proximity with reality:

I have read of a wretched Jew, who, by the command of a Moorish
emperor, was exposed in an area to the rage of a lion who had been
purposely kept fasting for eight and forty hours. The horrible roar of
the famished and infuriated animal made even the executioners
tremble as they fastened the rope round the body of the screaming
victim. Amid hopeless struggles, supplications for mercy, and shrieks
of despair, he was bound, raised, and lowered into the area. At the
moment he touched the ground, he fell prostrate, stupeﬁed, annihi-
lated. He uttered no cry – he did not draw a breath – he did not make
an effort – he fell contracting his whole body into a ball, and lay as
senseless as a lump of earth – So it fared with me; my cries and strug-
gles were over – I had been ﬂung into the arena, and I lay there. I
repeated to myself, ‘I am to be a monk,’ and there the debate ended.

(pp. 91–2)

Maturin points to the ‘wretched Jew’ in a footnote: ‘Vide Buffa –
Anachronism prepense.’ The anachronism deliberately used by Maturin is
a reference to John Buffa, whose Travels through the Empire of Morocco

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was published in 1810, much later than the events described in the ‘Tale
of the Spaniard’. Readers are invited to believe in Monçada’s narration
on the basis of real-life facts documented by a witness, the traveller John
Buffa, who in his Travels reported what had happened to an unfortu-
nate Jew who had incurred the wrath of Muley Yezid, a ferocious ruler
of Morocco notorious for his hatred of Jews. By saying ‘I have read’,
Monçada (and, one should add, Maturin) refers to an external source
which authenticates the pain inﬂicted on him (‘So it fared with me’) in
his taking the vows against his will. At the same time, of course, ‘we’,
as readers, ‘read’ Monçada’s narration itself and are put in a dual posi-
tion of control over, and knowledge of, what is narrated by both Buffa
and Monçada.

The episode denotes what may be called Maturin’s anxiety of imper-

ial conquest and oppression. The victim’s resignation with regard to his
destiny is similar to the prostration experienced by the conquered in
the presence of a conquering ‘beast’ which is hungry for ﬂesh – and for
power. Empires crush individuals through tyranny and forced conver-
sions. There is a sinister cycle entailed in all conquests: Catholicism
absorbed Monçada but, of course, was itself an ‘Empire’, which was close
to dominating the four corners of the globe and as such was an instru-
ment of colonization which converted the colonized; the Moors, them-
selves the object of persecution in the Spain of the Inquisition, had
ruled over the Jews of Morocco and often sent them to a cruel death,
the destiny of those who refused conversion; but of course, in Maturin’s
time, the only empire which ruled on more than one continent – and
in Ireland itself – was Great Britain. For Maturin, imperial conquests and
domination were real, as there was much evidence of them both in the
history of mankind and all over the world – in Morocco, in Spain, and
in Great Britain.

Maturin does not say what happens to the Jewish victim mentioned

in Buffa’s work, but he seems to imply that Monçada’s spiritual death
has a parallel in the Jew’s physical death. However, Maturin indicates
that the saddest stories of conquest and domination can generate tor-
ments or even illusions worse than death. Indeed, Monçada does not
die and survives to tell his story but is perpetually haunted by his own
experiences. Incredibly, in Buffa’s story, the Jew survives as well; the
chilling horror of a seemingly atrocious death is replaced by a sense of
calm relief and even of deﬁance:

While in this attitude, the animal approached him, ceased roaring,
smelt him two or three times, then walked majestically round him,

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and gave him now and then a gentle whisk with his tail . . . After
a short time had elapsed, the Jew, recovering from his insensibility,
and perceiving himself unmolested, ventured to raise himself up, and
observing the noble animal couched, and no symptom of rage and
anger in his countenance, he felt animated with conﬁdence. In short,
they became quite friendly, the lion suffering himself to be caressed
by the Jew with the utmost tameness.

Maturin does not give the full version of the story as the Jew’s survival
may have affected the tragic tone of the reference he used. However, no
such caution would have been necessary in any case: the lion may be
momentarily tame and even be teased by its victim, but he would always
retain a position of absolute power of life and death; the Jew may still
be alive, but this story, which the self-deceiving Jewish narrator enriches
with ‘a number of annotations and reﬂections . . . all tending to prove
the victory of their nation over the heathens’, cannot change a dark
destiny of slavery and oppression.

Because of severely restricting laws and of his own precarious posi-

tion within the Church of Ireland, Maturin could not offer an explicit
critique of Britain’s domination over Ireland. In the ‘Tale of the
Spaniard’, Spain is Maturin’s explicit target, but he is implicitly speak-
ing of England, the imperial power of the present and, possibly, the
future.

He could not declare it directly but, from his own Irish per-

spective, Britain’s conquest of Ireland had somehow squeezed out Irish
identity. His early novels were mainly shaped after Sidney Owenson’s
works and he was clearly inﬂuenced by her discussion of Irish themes
in the wider context of Britain’s colonialism.

All of this does not make

Maturin, the Protestant clergyman, and therefore in theory in a posi-
tion of dominance, an Irish nationalist eager to shake off the imperial
yoke of Britain. In a way, it was quite the opposite. Maturin was gen-
uinely interested in the destiny of his own country, but his perspective
is that of an Irishman who did not see the Act of Union of 1801 with
Britain as a real union between equal national communities. Instead,
he clearly resented Britain’s hegemony. All colonial conquests (in
Ireland, South America or South Africa) may indeed be lethal for the
colonized and the effect had mainly been, for the Irish, suffocation and
death: just like the snakes of South America, which ‘twine round’ their
victims ‘in folds of unnatural and ineffable union’, and which give a
sinister air to the conquest of the colonizer, the Union of England and
Ireland had resulted in the victory of the former but could determine
the death of the latter.

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Thus, Maturin offers a sophisticated critique of the colonial enterprise

in a kind of text whose traditional means and ends had in the past
usually avoided collisions with colonial issues. Like Beckford, Maturin
deploys travel literature to show the tangible proximity of the horrid
realities in distant regions. Melmoth the Wanderer, however, was written
34 years after Vathek and at a time when the colonial enterprise and
conquest were no longer a possibility or an option but a tangible reality.
The ‘geography’ available to Maturin was much vaster than that in
which Beckford lived and wrote his masterpiece: by the time Melmoth
the Wanderer was written, the colonial enterprise was well under way,
and the European overseas conquests were opening up to reveal all their
horrid mysteries. Knowledge of the world and Beckford’s own tentative
Oriental scholarship had been expanded; the dark and impenetrable
forest of the Caliph Vathek, the ferocity of whose animal beings he
could only guess, had now become an open, visible and ‘unnatural’
spectacle of cruelty and destruction.

The dividing line between the two writers is their different positions

regarding the ‘Orient’ and the colonized. Beckford studied it with all his
erudition and from a position which was (perhaps not deliberately or
actually, but at least potentially) one of domination. Maturin uses very
similar narrative strategies to deploy the West-East intercourse and
to make it concrete, but at the same time he speaks from the position
of a dominated subject within an ever-expanding Empire; he could
therefore offer a perspective which was both hegemonic and hege-
monized, dominating and dominated. Maturin was a colonized within
a colonizing Empire – he was not an ‘Orientalist’ but, so to speak, an
‘Orientalized’ who felt like a stranger in his own land – an Empire
whose parts were not united.

Notes

1. Lord Byron, Byron’s Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1981), vol. 3, p. 423.

2. The Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin, ed. Fannie

E. Ratchford and William H. McCarthy, Jr (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1937), p. 95.

3. Lord Byron, letter to John Murray, 2 April 1817, Byron’s Letters and Journals

(London: John Murray, 1981), vol. 5, p. 203.

4. On British neglect of Near-Eastern affairs up to the early decades of the nine-

teenth century see M.S. Anderson, The Eastern Question 1774–1923 (London:
Macmillan, 1966), and Allan Cunningham, Anglo-Ottoman Encounters in the
Age of Revolution, ed. Edward Ingram (London: Frank Cass, 1993).

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5. See Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1935), pp. 136–78.

6. Roger Lonsdale, ‘Introduction’ to Vathek (1786), ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1970), p. xxv. All subsequent references to Vathek
are from this edition and will be given in parentheses in the text.

7. This advertisement was published in the Morning Chronicle. Quoted in Guy

Chapman, Beckford ([1937] London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952), p. 202.

8. Readers had good reason to believe in the authenticity of Vathek. In the

introduction to his own English translation of Beckford’s original French
version which he ﬁrst published without Beckford’s permission, Samuel
Henley seemed to imply that the work did indeed have an original in Arabic.
The implications of the seemingly multiple translations of Vathek are
discussed by Adam Roberts and Eric Robertson, ‘The Giaour’s Sabre: A
Reading of Beckford’s Vathek’, Studies in Romanticism 35 (Summer 1996),
199–211.

9. See Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (London:

William Heinemann, 1910), pp. 125–36.

10. Gentleman’s Magazine 57 (January 1787), 55. Quoted in Lonsdale, ‘Preface’ to

Vathek, p. xvii.

11. Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), pp. 61–71. Of course, the
analysis of the interplay of romance and realism has become much more
reﬁned and persuasive. See for instance Kenneth W. Graham, ‘Beckford’s
Adaptation of the Oriental Tale in Vathek’, Enlightenment Essays 5 (1974),
24–33, and Malcolm Jack, ‘Introduction’, Vathek and Other Stories (London:
Penguin, 1993), pp. xix–xx.

12. The note does not give a reference to its account of Vathek’s gaze but Roger

Lonsdale traces its source again in d’Herbelot’s work.

13. Haroun al Raschid was Vathek’s grandfather; cf. Vathek, p. 124.
14. Alexander Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’, Collected Poems, ed. Bonamy Dobrée

(London: Dent, 1963), pp. 76–96, at p. 80.

15. Frederick S. Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved’, in

Kenneth Graham, ed., Vathek and the Escape from Time. Bicentenary Revalua-
tions (New York: AMS Press, 1990), pp. 157–72. Older assessments of
Beckford’s work within the Gothic tradition include Edith Birkhead, The Tale
of Terror (London: Constable, 1921), pp. 94–9, and Devandra Varma, The
Gothic Flame (London: Arthur Barker, 1957), pp. 132–5.

16. Frederick S. Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved’,

p. 169.

17. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’

(1773), in E.J. Clery and Robert Miles, eds, Gothic Documents: a Sourcebook,
1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 127–31, at
p. 129.

18. Ibid. Italics mine.
19. On Beckford’s ‘mediative’ re-elaboration of and voracious attitude towards

his sources of knowledge on the East see in particular Frederick Garber, ‘Beck-
ford, Delacroix and Byronic Orientalism’, Comparative Literature Studies 18
(1981), 321–2.

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20. Edward Said, Orientalism ([1978], London: Penguin, 1991), p. 65. Said,

however, acknowledges that the Bibliothèque ‘was more capaciously thorough
than any work before it’ (p. 64). A Saidian reading of Vathek is offered by El
Habib Benrahhal Serghini, ‘William Beckford’s Symbolic Appropriation of
the Oriental Context’, in C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen, eds, Oriental
Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1998), pp. 43–64.

21. In opposition to Said and, it seems to me, to Serghini’s rather extremist

views, John Garrett, in his ‘Ending in Inﬁnity: William Beckford’s Arabian
Tale’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5 (October 1992), 15–34, argues that
Beckford’s representation of the East, however ‘Westernized’, still allowed a
space of authenticity – or at least sincerity. I largely agree with Garrett’s
detailed analysis of ‘Beckford’s overlaying of one cultural topography
(English, Christian, known) upon another (Arabic, Islamic, unknown)’
(p. 16) in the narrative practice of Vathek but I ﬁnd his views partly unsatis-
factory as, apart from a discussion of the Faustian spirit of the Caliph Vathek,
he bypasses the implications of the Gothic within the colonial discourse.

22. Byron, Poetical Works, vol. 3, p. 423.
23. In this sense, Garrett intriguingly describes Vathek as an over-reacher who

acts as a typically Western geographer travelling in a world with whose dif-
ferent set of values (and even spatial, geometrical values) he ﬁnds himself at
odds. John Garrett, ‘Ending in Inﬁnity: William Beckford’s Arabian Tale’,
pp. 22–8.

24. The structure of Melmoth the Wanderer as a nest of ‘tales’ is discussed by Dale

Kramer, Charles Robert Maturin (New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 101.

25. Heinz Kosok, ‘Charles Robert Maturin and Colonialism’, in Mary Massoud,

ed., Literary Inter-Relations: Ireland, Egypt, and the Far East (Gerrards Cross:
Colin Smythe, 1996), pp. 228–34, at p. 228.

26. Joseph W. Lew, in ‘ “Unprepared for Sudden Transformations”: Identity and

Politics in Melmoth the Wanderer’, Studies in the Novel 26 (Summer 1994),
173–95, offers an extensive discussion of the ‘Tale of the Indians’ in the Irish
and colonial context.

27. Travel literature was not the only instrument used by Maturin to draw the

reader close to real-life events and people. Of course there was Ireland itself,
and references to certain cruel episodes of its recent history bestow an even
more sinister colouring upon the misfortunes of the novel’s characters. See
Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer [1820], ed. Douglas Grant
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 251n., 256n., 257n.. All subse-
quent references to Melmoth the Wanderer are from this edition and will be
given in parentheses in the text.

28. Paradoxically, according to Amy Elizabeth Smith the ‘Tale of the Spaniard’

was also the one in which, on the basis of some of the typical Gothic tropes,
Maturin felt greater freedom than everywhere else in the novel to experi-
ment in both the narrative structure and the psychology of the characters:
Amy Elizabeth Smith, ‘Experimentation and “Horrid Curiosity” in Maturin’s
Melmoth the Wanderer’, English Studies 74 (1993), 524–35.

29. Melmoth the Wanderer has been read as an endless story of broken or

unnatural unions, especially of family ties. See Jack Null, ‘Structure and

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Theme in Melmoth the Wanderer’, Papers in Language and Literature 13 (1977),
133–47.

30. See Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 57–64, 120–2, 139.

31. Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, History of Paraguay, 2 vols (Dublin,

1769), vol. 1, p. 21.

32. Ibid., pp. 21–2.
33. In the original sentence in French, the action is described as ‘avoit fait . . .

violence’, which in eighteenth-century French clearly indicated rape.

34. John Buffa, Travels through the Empire of Morocco (London, 1810), p. 152.
35. Ibid., pp. 152–3.
36. Although he exclusively discusses the ‘Tale of the Indians’, I largely agree

with Lew’s argument, according to which ‘Spain’s Catholicism mimetically
doubles, and even helps to produce England’s own ﬁerce Protestantism’. See
Lew, ‘ “Unprepared for Sudden Transformations” ’, p. 186.

37. For a discussion of Maturin’s fervently Irish and anti-colonial feeling in his

early novel The Milesian Chief (1811), see Kosok, ‘Charles Robert Maturin and
Colonialism’, pp. 230–2.

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Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial
Moor

Kim Ian Michasiw

‘Hah! Say you so, enchanting Moor?’ exclaimed Victoria, half
frantic with joy at the meaning contained in his words; and,
breathless with contending emotions of hope and doubt,
seizing his hand, she pressed it to her bosom.

‘Signora! Be calm, be composed’, cried Zoﬂoya, ‘and honour

not thus, unworthily, the lowest of your slaves.’

Thus an early exchange between Charlotte Dacre’s Victoria di Loredani
and her Moorish familiar Zoﬂoya in the 1806 novel bearing his name.
Zoﬂoya’s self-designation as ‘slave’ is, at one level, a trace of his ironic
participation in the discourse of Romance. Within that discourse, most
men in Victoria’s orbit are, or ought to be, enslaved, as Zoﬂoya’s deft
use of the plural indicates. Those other men are not, however, of African
descent; they do not participate in the other discourse of slavery, present
in 1806 in England (if not in Dacre’s imagined sixteenth-century
Venice). In England in 1806 the Houses of Parliament and the news-
papers were ﬁlled with debate concerning the abolition of Britain’s par-
ticipation in the West African slave trade. In permitting Zoﬂoya to call
himself a slave, Dacre is insisting that the current status of his race not
be forgotten, that the increasingly asymmetrical power relations
between Victoria and Zoﬂoya be understood with reference to African
slaves and their European masters. Or rather she is insisting that Zoﬂoya
be understood in relation to the discourse of abolitionism and the con-
structions that discourse had imposed upon the African.

As I will argue below, the conventional discourse of abolitionism fed

and throve upon the pathetic ﬁgure of the ‘dying negro’. Dacre, in con-
trast, insists upon the African as a ﬁgure of power, and a power particu-
larly associated with a white woman. In her revisionist project Dacre

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has recourse to another, superceded ﬁgure for the African, the Moor, a
term replaced in almost all abolitionist texts by ‘the Negro’ and surviv-
ing in political discourse only as part of the racialized epithet ‘black-
amoor’. By drawing upon the literary and historical associations of the
Moor, Dacre enables herself to attack one of the most cherished ele-
ments of abolitionist orthodoxy, the inherent pathos of the African.
That such an attack is double-edged goes, I think, without saying and I
will return to those edges in all their dangerous ambiguity at the essay’s
close.

‘Rosa Matilda’ performs an abolitionist poem

Dacre’s Hours of Solitude: A Collection of Original Poems (1805) may be
understood as a tour through the popular sub-genres of shorter poetry
at the turn of the nineteenth century. The two volumes are announced
as being by Charlotte Dacre ‘better known by the name Rosa Matilda’,
the pseudonym she had adopted for her contributions to newspapers.
Many of the poems bear sub-titles of the order of ‘written at sixteen’
which serve to separate them from the soi-disant 23-year-old who pub-
lishes them.

In its emphasis on age, the collection creates something

like a kunstlerroman, with lyric snapshots of the poet coming of age
through a process of experimentation with a variety of fashionable
forms and topics. There are ballads, brief love lyrics, imitations of
Ossian, coupleted odes, poems ‘after the manner of some Modern
poets’, attempts at blank verse narrative and experiments with elabo-
rate stanza forms. Recent readers have been most intrigued, though, by
her more sanguinary and/or overtly Gothic poems ‘Julia’s Murder’,
‘Death and the Lady’, ‘The Maniac’, ‘The Murderer’, ‘The Skeleton
Priest’.

As pertinent to Zoﬂoya, however, are two other poems in more con-

ventional genres: the Orientalist ‘Moorish Combat’ and the abolition-
ist ‘The Poor Negro Sadi’. On the face of it Dacre’s exercise in
abolitionism is utterly conventional.

The generic terms from the abo-

litionist lyric were laid down in 1773 in Thomas Day and John
Bicknell’s ‘The Dying Negro’, which is sub-titled ‘a Poetical Epistle Sup-
posed to be written by a Black, (who lately shot himself on board a
vessel in the river Thames); to his intended wife’.

The poem details the

pastoral innocence in which the speaker lived while in Africa, the
treachery and violence of the white slavers, the misery of the slave ship,
and the torments of slave labour. Individualizing the poem is the

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account of the speaker’s reciprocated love for a white servant whom he
loves despite his acute consciousness of her obscure birth. Notable too
is the speaker’s overt longing for revenge.

Vastly popular, ‘The Dying Negro’ was frequently reprinted. Even

more, it was imitated with increasingly differentiated variations.

Stand-

ard abolitionist poems treat all, or a part of, a relatively uniform narra-
tive. That fabula begins in a more or less idyllic West Africa. The slave
ships arrive and with a greater or lesser degree of treachery or violence,
the slave-to-be is torn from his family, his wife, his beloved. The captive
then lives through, or dies amid the inhuman conditions of, the ‘middle
passage’. Arriving either in the West Indies or America the captive is
sold at market and plunged immediately into an alternation between
brutally difﬁcult labour and even more brutal beatings. He may or may
not escape but that escape leads only to recapture and/or to death.
Death by drowning or as a consequence of ill-treatment and exposure
are preferred. Day and Bicknell’s pistol is not much emulated. This
narrative may be treated extensively or intensively. Characters may be
named, developed, localized, or the enslaved and their captors may be
treated anonymously. The poetic speaker may be the poet or the poet
may ventriloquize the enslaved African. Moments within the generic
fabula may be selected as the work’s primary focus or the entire move-
ment may be represented. The scene of the ﬁnal escape and death may
be in the West Indies or it may be in Britain itself. The poem may be
written in ballad stanzas, in rhyming couplets or in blank verse.

A given poet’s choices among these options inﬂuence considerably

the poem’s ideological emphases and suggest certain stresses within the
ediﬁce of abolitionism. A more extended treatment of the moment of
capture tends to place greatest blame for the iniquities of the trade
on the merchants and, occasionally, on the African middlemen who
brought the slaves to the coast. Dilating on the middle passage viliﬁes
sailors and their captains, while a focus on conditions in the West Indies
directs the attack to the planters and their white overseers. Bringing the
Dying Negro to Britain obliges the common reader to take stock of her
or his share of the responsibility.

As merchants exercised considerable direct political inﬂuence and as

attacks on sailors and their captains became more vexed during the long
wars with Revolutionary France, the ‘Creole’ planter becomes the most
convenient recipient of blame, a blame that shapes itself into accusa-
tions of deviance, even devolution. Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s character-
ization is typical:

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In sickly languors melts his nerveless frame,
And blows to rage impetuous Passion’s ﬂame.
Fermenting swift, the ﬁery venom gains
The milky innocence of infant veins.
There swells the stubborn will, damps learning’s ﬁre,
The whirlwind wakes of uncontroul’d desire.

The effects on Creole women are analogous: ‘See her, in monstrous fel-
lowship, unite/ At once the Scythian and the Sybarite.’

Abolitionist

verse is not entirely clear whether these effects derive from the practice
of slave-holding, from association, even at a considerable remove,
with Africans, or from the hot, enervating climate of the tropics.
Rigorous abolitionist writers recognized that too great an emphasis on
climate and its malign impact on human character led either to
questions about the moral potential of the African, or to a notion of
racial difference that played directly into the arguments of ‘polygenists’
who argued that Africans were not in fact of the same species as
Europeans.

The efforts of the scrupulous are, however, outweighed by

the common knowledge that hot climates rendered white men and
women indolent, cruel and subject to sensual appetites. We are not far
here from Zoﬂoya’s Victoria, though Victoria has not the excuse of a
tropical climate.

More crucial to the present purpose, though, is the image of the

African developed and promulgated in abolitionist writings. Africans are
always victims, are always rendered the passive recipients of torment.
The convention of the Dying Negro depends strongly on the choice of
death being the one active position the enslaved African can assume.
Slave rebellions certainly took place and not all abolitionist poets, as
we have seen, are reluctant to call for the African’s revenge, but the
slave who escapes, gathers followers about him, and rises against his
erstwhile masters is not a ﬁgure for abolitionist verse. Poetic justice is
better carried out by hurricanes and volcanoes than by armed African
insurgents.

The pre-captive African is above all an innocent being. That inno-

cence may show itself in one of two primary modes. The ﬁrst we might
short-hand as the simple savage, the second as the tropical swain. Day
and Bicknell are ﬁrmly in the former camp. Their ‘dying negro’ recalls
his freedom:

Ye streams of Gambia, and thou sacred shade!
Where, in my youth’s ﬁrst dawn I joyfully stray’d

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Oft have I rouz’d amid your caverns dim,
The howling tiger, and the lion grim,
In vain they gloried in their headlong force,
My javelin pierc’d them in their raging course.

(ll.126–131)

Living at one with a nature that is something like a wild animal show,
this sort of African does not labour but dwells in abundance, spear in
one hand, faithful mate in the other. He is manly, valiant, monoga-
mous, individualistic, an Ossianic hero translated into an opulent land-
scape and freed from Ossian’s obsessive tribalism. This individualism is
of considerable importance, since it ﬂies in the face both of what ethno-
graphic knowledge there was about West Africans and of what we might
call the Oroonoko tradition. Aphra Behn’s enslaved prince, especially as
mediated by Thomas Southerne’s dramatic adaptation, has extensive
inﬂuence in anti-slavery ﬁction but less force among the poets.
Oroonoko has been deprived of his people and those people might
always be regathered about him. This potential has appeal to more con-
servative writers on slavery. In Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné the
captive prince Yambu sulks in his tent until he is restored to his ruling
position by the humanitarian planter Savillon. Such overt belief in
aristocracy is, however, a bad ﬁt with the governing bourgeois values of
abolitionism. Moreover, the thought of hierarchically organized groups,
which existed latently among the plantations, is not a comforting one
even to those rhetorically enthused by the thought of the negro’s
revenge.

More comforting, and hence more prevalent, is the African as inno-

cent agrarian, tending his larger or smaller ﬁelds at peace, at least until
the slavers come. The idealized yeoman farmer carries immense prestige
across a number of ideological positions in the later eighteenth century.
A working relation to the land is a precondition to civic virtue among
all who subscribe to the ideals of liberty and property, and the smaller
landowner is far less susceptible of the vicious inﬂuences of luxury than
is the holder of vast estates. Thus the African as farmer torn both from
land and family and obliged to work another’s land in perpetual inden-
tures is an ideal ﬁgure for pathos.

And that, above all, is what the enslaved African becomes. He (or she,

though the lot of the female African is one far less frequently repre-
sented) is the occasion for sympathetic tears and righteous indignation.
His plight is a call to action from the British public. The negro is ‘poor’,
‘dying’, ‘wronged’. His revenge is to be enacted by cosmic forces rather

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than by his own hands.

It is certainly not to be pursued by groups of

the like-minded oppressed.

Dacre’s ‘The Poor Negro Sadi’ appears to conform on the key generic

issue of affect. It appears entirely conventional in other ways as well
but, as noted, variations in emphasis within the genre can be telling.
The poem begins with an apostrophe to the poor negro ‘the lone victim
fate dooms for a slave’ (l.2).

Dacre has chosen not to permit her African

to speak; her poetic speaker directly addresses the European reader:

And believe, when you see him in agony bending

Beneath the hard lash, if he fainting should pause,

That pure are to heaven his sorrows ascending,

And dear must you pay for the torture you cause.

(ll.13–16)

Sadi becomes an excuse for the speaker’s exhortations and an occasion
for melting the hardened European heart. Dacre touches brieﬂy on the
early episodes in the generic narrative. Wrenched from ‘his innocent
dwelling/ And torn from Abouka, the wife of his soul’ (ll.5–6), Sadi
endures force-feeding; he ‘resolves to escape, or he dies’ (l.26). Plung-
ing into the ocean he swims to an English ship by which he is rescued
but the ‘sable victim of sorrow’ (l.33) is transported to ‘Albion’s shore’
(l.38) rather than returned to Africa. The greater part of the poem is
devoted to Sadi’s helpless wanderings in England on whose ‘plains’ he
is ‘cast’ (l.42). Friendless, forlorn, unable to ﬁnd food or shelter, Sadi
wanders despairing for three days and nights. Wishing only to die, he
stretches himself on a doorstep. But even there he cannot ﬁnd peace;
he is dragged away and left in a freezing ﬁeld by ‘hell-born tormentors’
(l.63). The poem follows with an address to Heaven, characterized here
as an agency that has observed Sadi’s torment and noted only that ‘Pure,
pure to thy throne his last sighs are aspiring/ Tho’ sable his skin, tho’
unchristian his tone!’ (ll.75–6). It concludes with a repetition of the
initial apostrophe.

Against the generic background sketched above, several elements

stand out. The ﬁrst is the English setting of Sadi’s ﬁnal torments. The
poem insists that the Mansﬁeld decision that a slave became free the
moment he arrived on British soil had done little to improve the lot of
such free Africans.

Setting oppression at home eliminates the easy

blame of degenerate Creole: Sadi’s ‘hell-born tormentors’ are of solid
English stock. Attributing Sadi’s death to the cold performs a reversal of
the deadly climate argument which supported the English in their dis-
inclination to do physical labour in the tropics.

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More striking still is the poem’s ruthless pathologization of Sadi. He

is poor, lone, forlorn, unpitied, wretched. He suffers horror, anguish,
sadness, despair, and horror again. He ends his sufferings in hopeless
submission, no longer imploring. Even his one moment of apparent
triumph, being hauled from the sea on the point of death by drowning
is punctured by the speaker’s proleptic interjection:

But vainly preserv’d, sable victim of sorrow!

An end far more dreadful thine anguish must have

Tho’ a moment from hope it faint lustre may borrow,

Soon, soon, must it sink in the gloom of the grave.

(ll.33–6)

While it would be rash to suggest that Sadi is the most unremittingly
pathetic of the dying negroes who populate abolitionist verse, it is
difﬁcult to see how an increase of pathos might be achieved. The
poem performs one aspect of its genre so intensely and in such isola-
tion from mitigating, contrasting elements, that the pathos becomes
grotesque. We might think of it, on the model of the psychoanalytic
part-object, as a part-affect cloven off from any emotional context and
fetishized.

This apprehension of the grotesque is ampliﬁed by a prosodic deci-

sion that can only be labelled bizarre. The attentive reader will have
observed something odd about the poem’s rhythm. ‘The Poor Negro
Sadi’ is composed in a ‘headless’ anapestic tetrameter; that is, each line
commences with an iamb and is then followed by three anapests, the
anapest in the second foot being effected most often by a kind of
enforced demotion, a calculated oppression, as it were, of words that
ought to bear stress. If the reader will forgive a moment’s scansion, I
will illustrate.

Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial Moor

˘ ˘

x ˘

˘ x

x ˘

At length in a moment of anguish despairing

x ˘ ˘ x

˘ ˘

Poor Sadi resolves to escape, or he dies:

˘ x

x ˘

He plung’d in the ocean, not knowing or caring

˘ ˘ x

If e’er from its waves he was doom’d to arise.

(ll.25–8)

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This is among the most regular of the poem’s stanzas and illustrates well
the metre’s insistent quality. Matters become more complicated in the
second foot of many lines as in the ﬁve lines beginning with ‘The poor
negro Sadi’ (ll.1, 21, 42, 44, 77). In such lines the lexical stress on the
ﬁrst syllable of the word ‘negro’ is negated, hence demoted, by the
word’s placement, following upon the strong stress of ‘poor’, and by
the metrical pattern. Thus the designator ‘negro’ is demoted to stress-
lessness on ﬁve of the seven times it appears in the body of the poem.
In its other two appearances it is involved in exactly the same metrical
process, save that on those occasions the victim is the word ‘wretched’:
‘In vain, wretched negro! Thou lookest around thee/In vain, wretched
negro! So lowly dost bend’ (ll.49–50). It is as if the word ‘negro’ itself
breeds metrical coercion.

Tensions between metric and lexical stress occur in the second foot

on several other occasions: twice each with ‘cold’, ‘keen’ and ‘lone’. All
of these are key pathos-bearing adjectives and all suffer demotion. More-
over, there is one line in which the metre and stress come into collision
throughout and that is in the stanza describing Sadi’s death: ‘His shrunk
heart scarce ﬂutter’d, scarce heav’d his faint breath’ (l.70). It is hard
labour to read this line as a series of anapests. We might dismiss this as
the work of a mediocre poet on a bad day, save that the irregularities
crop up where the rendering pathetic of Sadi is most intense.

Why employ anapestic tetrameter here, a verse form more usual for

slight amatory poems and for satires?

At the turn of the nineteenth

century there was a short-lived fashion for anapestic elegies, a fashion
which commenced with Cowper’s ‘The Poplar-Field’ and persisted
through Wordsworth’s experiments in the mode in Lyrical Ballads.

More pertinently, for the present purpose, in the 1790s non-iambic
metres were closely associated with radical politics. The early numbers
of the reactionary Anti-Jacobin Review are ﬁlled with vitriolic attacks on
prosodic innovation. The preferred mode of anti-Jacobin attack was
parodic imitation and the Review’s dutifully republished ‘Jacobin’ poems
are all in ‘deviant’ metres. In the fourth number the Review offers ‘La
Sainte Guillotine’, ‘a specimen of Jacobin poetry, which we give to the
world without any comment or imitation. We are informed . . . that it
will be sung at the Meeting of the friends of Freedom.’

The poem

begins: ‘From the blood bedewed vallies and mountains of France/ See
the Genius of Gallic invasion advance’ (ll.1–2). It marches on in per-
fectly formed anapestic tetrameters.

As a poet frequently writing for the popular press, Dacre cannot have

been unaware of the Anti-Jacobin Review’s persistence in connecting non-

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iambic meters, and especially triple meters, with lovers of the guillotine.
This makes her decision the more striking. Does she work in the metre
because it was the metre in which abolitionist works were written, or
because it was the medium in which parodic imitations of radical works
were penned?

Charlotte Dacre exhumes the Moor

‘The Poor Negro Sadi’ has at least a hint of being a ventiloquized abo-
litionist lyric commissioned by the editors of the Anti-Jacobin Review.
This hint gathers context when we turn back a page or two in Hours of
Solitude to examine that volume’s other staging of race, ‘Moorish
Combat’. From the opening stanzas’ description of the heroic lover
Marli, readers of Zoﬂoya are on familiar ground:

A snow-white turban crown’d his brow severe,

Its crescent sparkled like the beamy morn;

A dazzling vest his graceful form array’d,

And gems unnumber’d did his belt adorn.

(ll.5–8)

Marli’s costume is identical to Zoﬂoya’s in Victoria’s prophetic dream.
Marli is lingering about the mouth of a cave in which dwells his beloved
Ora. He appeals to her to leave the cave and join him, which she soon
does, albeit not without a ‘trembling pause, as doubtful of her doom’
(l.24). They fervently embrace and surrender to their mutual passion:
‘How vain to stem their rapture as it ﬂow’s/ Or whisper to their stag-
g’ring sense beware’ (ll.33–4). His eyes wander over her charms while
she stares down demurely. At which moment the narrative shifts to
‘ﬁerce Zampogni’ (l.39) the rival who shoots down upon them ‘like a
ﬂaming meteor’ (l.40) sparkling sabre in hand. Marli and Zampogni
ﬁght. Marli has initially the upper hand until ‘mysterious fate directs
the ﬂying steel’ (l.63) and Zampogni’s blade ﬁnds its target. The dying
Marli resigns Ora to his rival and that rival hastily seizes his prize.
Too hastily, as he has failed to observe the ‘dagger, in her vest till now
conceal’d’ (l.73) that Ora buries in Zampogni’s breast and then in her
own.

We have entered an African world far removed from that of ‘Negro

Sadi’. It is unlikely that Sadi’s courtship of ‘the wife of his soul’ Abouka,
bore much resemblance to this scene of Moorish passion, battle and
murder. The ‘pathetic negro’ of the abolitionist tradition is deeply

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attached to family but only in the most domestic way. He is a poor,
unarmed farmer, not a warrior swathed in gold and gemstones. The
negro woman may be caring and maternal as she becomes popularly,
especially after the publication of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior
Districts of Africa in 1799,

but an apostle of heroic love she was not.

The Moor designates something very much other than the negro.

The Moor, like the gypsy and the Jew, was once Europe’s internal

Other. Unlike gypsies and Jews, though, the Moors’ presence in Europe
had a deﬁnite termination date. Their ‘alien’ presence in Europe had
ended with the conquest of Granada in 1492. Expelled, converted
by force or killed, the Moors had ceased to be as a nation or a people.
Fortuitously their disappearance coincides with the discovery of the
New World and the inception of the long modernity and they become,
in their literary incarnations, prisoners of time, ﬁgures of all that had
to be expelled in order for the modern world to come into being for
good and ill. Thus Othello, the exemplary lover and warrior who is
hopefully befuddled by domesticity and peace. Thus Dryden’s doomed
Granadans in The Conquest of Granada 1 & 2, too intimately attached to
the codes of love and honour to function in the world that is coming
into being.

The elegiac Moor of later seventeenth-century drama aligns well with

the Cavalier court threatened on all sides by bourgeois, dissenting
values. The heroic Cavalier ideal recognized itself as destined to mar-
ginality and masquerade and thus found congenial self-representations
in peoples nearing extirpation. Whether there were Moors or Peruvians
mattered little. Lost, though, in the representations of the doomed is
any sense of how the ﬂourishing civilizations they made might have
come into being. Those devoted absolutely to passion and honour
administer bad kingdoms and build collapsible cities. Dryden’s
Granadans have beauty, love and moral excellence, but under their
guidance the State falls like a leaf.

Seventeenth-century representations of the Moors, then, see them as

representative of cultural orders superceded by more adaptable peoples.
That adaptability is a virtue is not, however, certain and the British were
not at all certain that the development of imperial Spain was anything
like progress. There are two lines of literary development across the eigh-
teenth century which are of importance here. The ﬁrst is the cult of the
colonized Gaelic peoples of the British periphery. At the centre of this
cult are the Ossianic poems of James Macpherson, the literary sensation
of the 1760s. The key historico-cultural point of Macpherson’s project
is that the ancient Gaels were, in terms of sensibility, far more advanced

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peoples than the Teutonic barbarians who displaced them. Macpherson
accepts the historical inevitability of the inheritance of the world by the
sons of little men but he does so with vast regret. This regret is of a
different order than that of Dryden’s for his Granadans, for it is for a
nation, or a race, rather than for a class, for a culture in its totality rather
than for a fragment of that culture. Furthermore, Macpherson’s model
is easily translated to other cultures. If reﬁned Gaelic culture is doomed
to extinction at the hand of barbarians, so (at least potentially) were the
advancements of the Moors.

The second line of development is Gothic, with its dependence upon

the Inquisition as agency of arbitrary power. In the best-known Gothic
works of the 1790s, the Inquisition manifests itself as the secret police
force of the Roman Catholic Church. Its enormities are directed at
private Christian citizens (and at those in error within the Church). The
role of the Inquisition in the ethnic cleansing of Spain after 1492 awaits
Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) to receive full treatment and
there the focus is on the forced conversion of Jews rather than of Moors.
At the same time, the role of the Inquisition in the creation of Modern
Christian Europe appears as a linked metonym even when the inquisi-
tors are plying their trade in Italy. The shadowy presence of the
Inquisition in The Monk’s Madrid, ﬂirts more nearly with memories of
genocide. And if, as David Mogen and his colleagues argue, ‘Gothicism
results when the epic moment passes, and a particular rift in history
develops and widens into a dark chasm that separates now from what
has been’, the role of the Inquisition in the extirpation of Moorish
culture is just such a rent.

Zoﬂoya dispatches the negro

Zoﬂoya, in its conﬁrmed rejection of the designation ‘negro’ and its
embrace of the Moor, appears at ﬁrst sight to withdraw from contem-
porary debate about Africans, but I think it ﬁnally does not.

As I have observed elsewhere, the ﬁrst point the narrative makes, in

its long-delayed introduction of its title character, is that of Zoﬂoya’s
great personal beauty.

Beauty is an attribute that Africans, in so far as

they are designated Moors, are allowed; the African, designated as negro,
cannot be beautiful. The possibility of the beautiful black man or
woman is much debated in aesthetic texts but in artistic representations
and, increasingly after the turn of the nineteenth century, in ethnog-
raphy, objective beauty was denied to the negro. Matters had not quite
reached the point that they did in the 1830s when ethnographers were

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arguing that ‘a strong and handsome people’ like the Fante or the
Mandinka of West Africa could not be negroes.

The association of

the term negro with the impossibility of beauty was, however, well
ingrained. J.F. Blumenbach’s 1795 classiﬁcatory description will serve as
a representative:

Colour black; hair black and curly, head narrow, compressed at the
sides; forehead knotty, uneven, malar bones protruding outwards;
eyes very prominent; nose thick, mixed up as it were with the wide
jaws; alveolar edge narrow, elongated up front; upper primaries
obliquely prominent; lips very puffy; chin retreating. Many are
bandy-legged.

Zoﬂoya is granted numerous qualities that Dacre’s contemporaries,

even the most committed of anti-slavery activists, would have denied
to Africans and he negates any number that they would have asserted.
Though exquisitely polite, Zoﬂoya is a solitary. He displays none of the
signs of devoted emotional attachment to family made famous in
abolitionist verse. He lacks devotion to the elderly, and suggests Lilla’s
elderly aunt as the subject for Victoria’s ﬁrst poisoning. He displays
nothing of the passionate temper supposed to be inevitable in Africans.
Although he is the medium for Victoria’s revenge, he displays none of
the supposedly endemic vengefulness of the African character. He is
inclined neither to indolence nor to debauch. He shows much ﬁdelity
to Victoria but none to Henriquez, his master, nor to his ﬁrst Spanish
master, of whom more below. Racially different he may be but ‘negro’
he is not.

He does, however, appear in the non-dream portion of the novel by

disappearing, or more properly by dying, an art in which, as we have
seen, the literary negro specialized. It is worth observing in some detail
the manner, and order, of the presentation of Zoﬂoya after he manifests
himself in Victoria’s dream. His presence in the dream puzzles Victoria.
At ﬁrst she cannot think who the Moor might be

whose person she had a confused idea of having seen frequently
before. After a minute’s reﬂection, she identiﬁed him for Zoﬂoya,
the servant of Henriquez. Why he should be connected with her
dreams, who had never entered her mind while waking, she could
not divine.

(p. 137)

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The unseen, deferential servant who, though ‘tall [and] commanding,’
(p. 137) merely attends his master suddenly becomes only too visible
to Victoria and too accomplished, it would seem, ever to have been
missed.

Zoﬂoya’s sum of beauties and perfections inspires a homicidal fury in

the old servant Latoni, who stabs the Moor with his dagger and dumps
his bleeding body into a canal. Latoni makes this confession while he
lies dying of a mysterious illness. It is after that confession and death,
but before Zoﬂoya’s return, that we learn Zoﬂoya’s history; that is, the
introductory history is provided in the place of a eulogy: unlike the
revenger, Zoﬂoya does not (cannot at this point) speak his history. He
is, of course, a Moorish noble, reduced by chance of war to a menial
station. Henriquez is his second master. The ﬁrst is ‘a Spanish noble-
man, who, pitying his misfortunes, considered him rather as a friend
than as an inferior’ (p. 141). That nobleman, intimate also with
Henriquez, becomes embroiled in a quarrel that costs him his life. On
his deathbed the Spanish noble ‘recommended to [Henriquez’s] future
protection, the Moor Zoﬂoya’ (p. 141).

The narrative does permit Zoﬂoya to recount the night of the

attempted murder. In contrast to the narrative voice, which attributes
Latoni’s crime to jealousy, the Moor waives any knowledge of or
speculation upon the assassin’s motives. He does, however, make an
important claim for another order of knowledge: ‘Fortunately, none of
my wounds proved to be serious; and being in possession of a secret
transmitted to me by my ancestors, for speedily healing even the most
dangerous ones . . .’ (p. 142). Zoﬂoya’s medical and pharmacological
knowledge, though modelled perhaps on Matilda’s arcane learning
in The Monk, is attributed to his ancestors. It is an inheritance from
his culture rather than the tutelage of a single eccentric father. Given
the infancy of mind attributed by both pro-slavery and abolitionist
writers to Africans, when designated with the term negro, the empha-
sis on the Moorish cultural heritage is no innocent gesture. Moreover,
when the narrator ﬁrst describes Zoﬂoya’s cultivation, she attributes it
in part to the ‘Spanish nobleman’. The Moor, on the other hand, in his
infrequent backward glances, ties himself ﬁrmly to his non-white
culture.

Racial debate at the turn of the nineteenth century strove occasion-

ally to distinguish North Africans from Sub-Saharans and to ﬁgure those
‘tawny’ Africans as quasi-Semitic and thus above black Africans, if below
Europeans, on the scale of the races. Dacre’s descriptions are notable for

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their refusal of any visible bleachings of her Moor. The question of
colour is voiced openly by Zoﬂoya himself: ‘Does the Signora believe,
then, that the Moor Zoﬂoya hath a heart dark as his countenance?’ (p.
151). Zoﬂoya insists on the Moor’s blackness, a complexion emphasized
by his frequently invoked white turban and bracelets of pearl. The
turban, the pearls, and Victoria herself, are glimmering white ornaments
around the Moor’s concentrated darkness. Zoﬂoya is as black, as visibly
different, as any negro, dying or otherwise, in abolitionist literature, and
this in a novel acutely conscious of gradations of colour within races.
The tiny, ﬂaxen-haired Lilla is consistently contrasted, especially in the
mind of Henriquez, with the tall, dark-haired Victoria. Henriquez

though he treated [Victoria] with friendship and respect . . . he did
no more: ﬁrst because he was absorbed in Lilla; and secondly, because
being so completely, both in mind a person, the reverse of that pure
and delicate being, he not only failed to view them as two creatures
of the same class, but almost thought of Victoria with a tincture of
dislike, from the very circumstance of her being so opposite to his
lovely mistress.

(p. 138)

It is worth pausing over the quasi-biological phrase ‘two creatures of the
same class’ which more than hints at a polygenist logic. For Henriquez,
physical and moral difference classify Lilla and Victoria as belonging to
separate species and it was precisely on grounds of physical and moral
difference that the African was derided. Lilla is the quintessence of
whiteness, a status picturesquely ﬁgured later in the novel when the
narrator dilates on the chiaroscuro effect of the insensate Lilla’s ‘snow-
white arms, bare nearly to the shoulder . . . her feet and legs resembling
sculptured alabaster’ contrasting with Zoﬂoya’s bare back as he carries
her to captivity (p. 203).

This level of racialized thinking appears

conﬁned to Henriquez, except to the degree that Victoria comes to
absorb it, but Henriquez, especially when set against his old-fashioned,
philosophical voluptuary brother, is the novel’s representation of the
coming race.

Victoria, Zoﬂoya and the narrator in their different ways contribute

to keeping race as the centre of the novel. Zoﬂoya alone, however, insists
that the status of his relationship with the novel’s Whites not be for-
gotten. Henriquez and his extended family may persuade themselves
that they treat Zoﬂoya ‘rather as a friend than an inferior’ (p. 141) but
the Moor chooses to disagree. Zoﬂoya self-identiﬁes as ‘the lowest of

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your slaves’ (p. 151), and as ‘the slave of your wishes’ (p. 162). Victoria
might choose to regard these as courtly metaphors, but in 1806 a black
man referring to himself as the slave of his white interlocutor cannot
wholly be a ﬁgurative exaggeration. Especially not when Zoﬂoya’s
status is never clariﬁed. Is he a free man who is acting as a servant to
Henriquez, or is he owned by the Spaniard? In an early scene of Zoﬂoya
standing silently behind Henriquez’s chair at dinner, the reader is not
privileged to observe the interactions of master and man. Victoria’s
growing intimacy with the Moor is rigorously focalized through her and
is densely woven with the gap between Zoﬂoya’s inherent majesty and
the servile postures he adopts. Even toward the novel’s close when his
deference fades and his ascendancy over all around him is palpable, the
Moor will not let reference to his status rest. After Zoﬂoya has let down
his guard enough to suggest that they both know they are ‘afﬁanced’,
Victoria involuntarily starts and demands to know his meaning. He
replies ‘A truce, fair Victoria, to folly! – am I not thy equal? – Ay thy
superior! – proud girl, to suppose that the Moor, Zoﬂoya, is a slave in
mind!’ (p. 242). With the not-incidental reference to her fairness,
Zoﬂoya reminds Victoria that even she sees him within a role she cannot
bring herself to name.

Within pages Zoﬂoya, the Moor, is revealed to be mere drapery for

Satan himself who stands ‘a ﬁgure, ﬁerce, gigantic, and hideous to
behold’ (p. 267). But even Satan in propria persona underscores owner-
ship when he assures Victoria that it has been he all along, ‘under the
semblance of the Moorish slave (supposed the recovered favourite of
Henriquez)’ who has guided her steps to perdition (p. 267). If we are
the sort of reader who believes that ﬁnal revelations transform, we are
perhaps relieved that Zoﬂoya is no Moor and never was. But Dacre’s text
is so riven with the discourse of race and slavery that the need to place
Dacre’s Moor amid that debate is not waived by the simple claim that
he was not a Moor after all, but merely in an expedient disguise.

This leaves us with a set of fairly difﬁcult questions about the way in

which Dacre’s Moor aligns himself with debates on race. Zoﬂoya’s rejec-
tion of the pathetic and pathologizing designator ‘negro’ is the text’s
foundational move. Insisting on Zoﬂoya’s racial difference, on his black-
ness, and on the cultivation of his cultural heritage, Dacre’s text wrests
Africans out of the primitive realm where both pro-slavery and aboli-
tionist texts preferred to lodge them. Moreover in insisting that Moorish
culture’s prime attributes were scientiﬁc and artistic and radically
muting, until the ﬁnal scenes, Zoﬂoya reminds its reader of one of
European modernity’s guilty secrets and the source of some several of

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its claims to superiority.

In emphasizing Europe’s erased debt to Africa,

Zoﬂoya ﬁles a salutary protest against the primitivism and pathos of
abolitonism’s negro.

The embrace of the designator Moor is more complex still in its

proffer of a self-identifying position to the African subject. Though
‘Moor’ brings with it chains of association less positive than those
emphasized in Zoﬂoya, Dacre is only too aware of the power of renam-
ing. Her own acts of self-designation have been detailed and analysed
in Lisa M. Wilson’s ‘Female Pseudonymity’, which underlines her
awareness of the linkage between label and identity.

More immedi-

ately pertinent, when considering race, is the example of her father.
Born Jacob Rey, renaming himself John King, and known to all as Jew
King (with all of the effrontery of that irreligious ‘christian’ name),
Dacre’s father appears consciously to have inhabited the extraordinar-
ily rigid designator, ‘Jew’. By all accounts King charged right through
the canonical racist strategy of giving dogs bad names and hanging
them to make that ‘bad name’ pay all the way to his marrying the
dowager Countess of Lanesborough and genteel retirement to Venice.
If embracing the Moor could do for Africans what embracing the Jew
did for Jacob Rey. . . .

The reader will already have formed objections, or at least recognized

the pitfalls inherent in the strategy of reclaiming racist designations.
How much damage did John King’s conﬁrmation of everything the
British bigot ‘knew’ about Jews do to the aspirations of other Jews in
England? What is to be gained in the shorter or longer term by reﬁg-
uring the African not as the pathetic victim of a militarily superior and
historically more advanced culture but rather as equal or superior beings
‘by a combination of events, and the chance of war . . . reduced to
menial circumstance’ (p. 141)?

Such circumstances might easily be reversed, as Zoﬂoya’s growing

ascendancy demonstrates. His inﬂuence over Victoria is one thing; his
inﬂuence over Leonardo’s troop of banditti is something else. During
his stay with the banditti, ‘[t]he Moor Zoﬂoya occasionally accompa-
nied a chosen troop . . . in their adventurous excursions.’ Those chosen
were ‘rufﬁans rather than robbers, and the bloodhounds of the band’
who on returning ‘unaminously . . . swore, that when he was among
them, they felt impelled to deeds which otherwise would have remained
unattempted’ (p. 245). Under Zoﬂoya’s guidance these rufﬁans’ pro-
clivity to rapine and bloodshed assumes monstrous dimensions. Upon
learning that Zoﬂoya is really Satan, the reader may be reassured but
memories of the bloody slave-rising in Sainte-Domingue were slow to

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die and such hagiographic memoirs of Toussaint l’Ouverture and James
Stephens’s Buonaparte in the West Indies (1803) were more than coun-
terbalanced by anti-Jacobin ripostes.

Fear of the ‘negro’s revenge’ was

real enough among the West Indian planters and Toussaint’s victory
made history of that fear. Though less immediate for those safely domi-
ciled in Britain, the fear of the African was very much a part of racial
thinking and was directly addressed by abolitionist pathos. In rejecting
that pathos, Dacre reopens the way to the psychically more powerful,
morally less trammelled African, reduced to servitude and the more
vengeful for it.

Her novel demarcates the way in which vengeance may be exacted,

who its ﬁrst victims will be, and how that vengeance will move from
the domestic space outward to the larger social sphere. Zoﬂoya gains his
power through the agency of a corruptible white woman, takes his
vengeance ﬁrst on those among the women who are incorruptible –
elderly aunts and hyperblonde virgins. Thence to masters and their
families and outward, through the power to command inherent in
those beyond good and evil, to the society at large. Zoﬂoya’s last non-
supernatural act is to command and to be obeyed by the Duke of Savoy’s
soldiers, sent out to capture the banditti: ‘Signors . . . retire immediately
from the cavern – if you persist in remaining, evil must betide you! You
impede my movements, and will yourselves suffer’ (p. 264). Thus the
menial slave concludes his progress by commanding the troops and all
is traceable back to Victoria.

The similarity of this narrative to various racist meta-narratives which

were current by the middle years of the nineteenth century is clear.
Parental indulgence has led Victoria to the indulgence of passion;
passion indulged is an invitation to the Moor and once invited the
Moor’s ascendancy is guaranteed. Had Victoria been properly socialized
she would have regarded Zoﬂoya with the conditioned reﬂex of disgust
with which Henriquez regards her deviations from the ideal whiteness
of woman. In light of later narratives, we can see Victoria as going
native, we can see Zoﬂoya’s kidnapping of Lilla as inter-racial rape, we
can see Zoﬂoya, in his role of tempter, as the voice of alterity threaten-
ing the frail network of repression and renunciation upon which
nineteenth-century Western civilization is founded.

All this is to suggest that as Dacre’s text is prescient in focusing male

desire on the child-like ﬁgure of Lilla, it also anticipates the so-called
scientiﬁc racism of the 1830s and after.

Few views of Africans could be

further from that of orthodox abolitionism than that found in Robert
Knox’s Races of Men (1846):

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If there be a dark race destined to contend with the fair races for a
portion of the earth, given to man as an inheritance, it is the Negro.
The tropical regions of the earth seem peculiarly to belong to him;
his energy is considerable: aided by the tropical sun, he repels the
white invader. From St Domingo he drove out the Celt; from Jamaica
he will expel the Saxon; and the expulsion of the Lusitanian from
Brazil, by the Negro, is merely a matter of time.

In the struggle of the races that is, in Knox’s view, the future only the
negro can vanquish the fair races. The great struggle will be to conclude
where the ‘tropical regions’ end. Few in the abolition debates could
envision this conquering African but, under the guise of the Moor,
Zoﬂoya can and does.

Zoﬂoya’s restoration of dignity, self-worth and culture to the African

is, as noted, a salutary and necessary corrective to abolitionism’s
pathetic, dying negro. What lies on the other side, though, of an African
‘thy equal – Ay thy superior’ (p. 242)? As with Lewis’s conjuring up of
the learned, crafty, desiring woman in The Monk’s demonic Matilda, the
spectre raised by the potent, magnetic, knowing Moor is not banished
by unveiling him as Satan. However Christianly superstitious the reader,
the domesticated woman and the enslaved African are far closer to
home than Satan, and their possible liberations far more frightening.
As it is the Gothic writer’s job to inspire fear, we may conclude that
Dacre is doing no more than she should. At the same time we might
consider her example as salutary as well in illustrating how the
banishing of one mode of racialized thought may prepare the way for
another.

Notes

1. Charlotte Dacre, Zoﬂoya, or The Moor, ed. Kim Ian Michasiw (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1997), pp. 152–3. All subsequent references are to this
edition, and page numbers are given in the text.

2. Dacre’s age remains a mystery. Most recent researchers have, however, been

persuaded by the dates mentioned in her death notice that she was close to
a decade older than she claimed.

3. See Adriana Craciun, ‘ “I hasten to be disembodied”: Charlotte Dacre, the

Demon Lover, and Representations of the Body’, European Romantic Review
6.1 (Summer 1995), 75–97.

4. There is something somewhat belated about Dacre’s exercise in the genre.

Charlotte Sussman has argued persuasively that abolitionism peaked in
1792–93 and like other radical causes suffered a diminution in the years fol-

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lowing. ‘Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792’, Representations 48 (Fall
1994), 48–69.

5. Thomas Day and John Bicknell, ‘The Dying Negro: a Poetical Epistle Sup-

posed to be written by a Black, (who lately shot himself on board a vessel
in the river Thames); to his intended wife’ (London: W. Flexney, 1773).

6. Although my focus here is on abolitionist verse, many of the same

characteristics feature in other abolitionist genres, including, or especially,
the parliamentary oration. Lord Grenville’s speech to the House of Lords on
24 June 1806 is a remarkably extensive tour through abolitionism’s narra-
tive and affective commonplaces. See Substance of the Debates on a Resolution
for Abolishing the Slave Trade (London: John Hatchard, 1806) pp. 88–110.

The analogous but more metered terms of abolitionist argument in the

works of the movement’s key spokespeople, Thomas Clarkson and Anthony
Benezet, and discussed by Peter J. Kitson, ‘ “Bales of Living Anguish”:
Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing’, ELH 67 (2000),
515–37.

7. ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq., on the Rejection of the Bill for

abolishing the Slave Trade’, ll. 49–54, 61–2. The Poems of Anna Laeticia
Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens and London:
University of Georgia Press, 1994).

8. Philip D. Curtin points out that the lack of a theory of acquired immunity

and the unavoidable recognition that Africans thrived in environments that
were the white man’s grave prompted later eighteenth-century doctors to
argue ‘that God had endowed Africans with immunity to fevers so that they
could live their lives in their own way without interference . . . . In this way
the misunderstanding of the medical men came ultimately to be enshrined
at the core of ‘scientiﬁc’ racism’. The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action,
1780–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964) p. 84.

Nicholas Hudson emphasizes also ‘the extent to which the abolitionist

movement itself adopted a “racial” outlook on non-Europeans’: ‘Nation to
Race: the origin of Racial Classiﬁcation in Eighteenth-Century Thought’,
Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, 3 (1996), 251. By Hudson’s logic, the designa-
tion ‘Moor’ is a sign of pre-racial thinking while ‘negro’ is an entirely racial-
ized term.

9. Unless the revenge is entirely personal, as in The Wrongs of Almoona, or

the African’s Revenge (Liverpool: H. Hodgson, 1788), attributed to William
Roscoe, in which Almoona’s beloved wife is taken from him by his Spanish
master. Almoona, in a ﬁt of honour, visits and kills his wife to save her from
a fate worse than death. Later Almoona, ﬁghting with the British against the
Spanish colonists, encounters the dying Spaniard and forgives him.
Almoona, with his vaguely Islamic name, has ties not only to the Oroonoko
precedent but also to the older literary tradition of the Moor, of which more
below.

10. Charlotte Dacre, Hours of Solitude, 2 vols (London: n.p., 1805), vol. 1,

pp. 117–22.

11. The ease with which such repatriation campaigns as that for the Province

of Freedom in Senegambia, led by Granville Sharp in the mid-1780s, were
able to collect hundreds of volunteers from among the black poor of
London is one indication of the difﬁcult life of the free African. The ﬁrst-

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year mortality rate among black settlers in the Province of Freedom was 39
per cent.

12. These are the uses to which Dacre puts the form elsewhere in Hours of Soli-

tude. See ‘Alas, Forgive Me’ and ‘The Reply’ and in the satirical ‘Fracas
Between the Deities: addressed to Mr. F—, an enthusiastic votary at the
shrines of Bacchus’.

13. Margaret Garner, ‘The Anapestic Lyrical Ballads: New Sympathies,’

Wordsworth Circle XIII, 4 (Autumn 1982), 183–8.

14. L. Rice-Oxley, ed, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1924),

p. 12.

15. The one other ‘serious’ use of anapestic meter in Hours of Solitude occurs in

the highly ambiguous elegy ‘To the Shade of Mary Robinson’. Robinson, of
course, was something of the ‘poster-girl’ for critiques of the debased status
of women through the 1790s. Robinson had also some not entirely savoury
connection with Dacre’s father, the usurer and gangster John King. See Anne
K. Mellor, ‘ “Making an Exhibition of Her Self”: Mary “Perdita” Robinson and
Nineteenth-Century Scripts for Female Sexuality’, Nineteenth-Century Con-
texts 22 (2000), 271–304.

16. Charlotte Dacre, ‘Moorish Combat’ in Hours of Solitude, vol. 1, pp. 108–12.

Line references will be given in parentheses in the text.

17. Park describes an incident when, in deep distress, he is succoured by a group

of African women. They improvise a song about his condition, a song he
translated literally but which was soon retranslated into poetry by Georgiana
Cavendish and set to music by G.G. Ferrari. Cavendish’s poem became a
ﬁxture in later editions of the Travels.

18. The extirpation of the Moors in Spain is a far more central element in the

literature of the Iberian peninsula than in that of Britain. For an overview
of the Moor in Spanish literature see Israel Burshatin, ‘The Moor in the Text:
Metaphor, Emblem, and Silence’, Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985), 98–117.

19. Julie Ellison, in ‘Cato’s Tears’, ELH 63 (1996), 571–601, suggests that the pre-

Iberian Moors of Addison’s Cato and James Thomson’s Sophonsiba have an
entirely different ideological function in which certain Moors may be seen
as heirs of the true Rome.

20. David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders and Joanne B. Karpinski, eds, Frontier Gothic:

Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature (Rutherford: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1993), p. 16.

21. Kim Ian Michasiw, ‘Introduction’ to Charlotte Dacre, Zoﬂoya, or the Moor

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. vii–ix.

22. Curtin, The Image of Africa, p. 370.
23. J.F. Blumenbach, ‘On the Natural Variety of Mankind’ in The Anthropological

Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. T. Bendyshe (London: n.p.,
1865), p. 264. One might suggest that had the designation ‘Moor’ been active
in the mid-nineteenth-century, the Fante and Mandinka might well have
emerged as Moorish peoples.

24. I note also Zoﬂoya’s thoughtful provision of a mantle of leopard skin for the

captive Lilla. Whatever the actual range of the leopard in the wild, such skin
is very much an emblem of the Africa of the slave-trading posts and Lilla’s
imprisonment, however facilitated by Victoria, is another form of ‘the
African’s revenge’ in the European imaginary.

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25. Victoria’s brother Leonardo shares something of this manner of thought as

when in his role as masked chief of banditti he greets Zoﬂoya’s assertion that
Victoria ‘will be mine’ with visible agitation ‘ “Your’s!” he muttered – but sud-
denly checking himself . . .’, (p. 239).

26. Walter Scott makes a similar point in The Talisman’s Saladin – warrior, states-

man, and physician – when contrasting his myriad talents, skills and graces
to the lumbering boors who are Western European nobles during the
Crusades. Set further back in time, however, and further east, The Talisman
does not engage so nearly with Western modernity’s foundational crimes.
Similarly Scott is more comfortable with the expulsion of the Jews in the
twelfth century than with Spain’s treatment of the Jews or with its extirpa-
tion of the Moors at the end of the ﬁfteenth.

27. Lisa M. Wilson, ‘Female Pseudonymity in the Romantic “Age of Personal-

ity”: the Career of Charlotte King/Rosa Matilda/Charlotte Dacre’, European
Romantic Review 9, 3 (Summer 1998), 393–420.

28. Notable among these is George Walker’s novel The Vagabond (1799), which

recycles the report that Toussaint’s troop had employed, as their standard, a
white infant impaled on a spear.

29. On which see Seymour Drescher, ‘The Ending of the Slave Trade and the

Evolution of European Scientiﬁc Racism’, in his From Slavery to Freedom:
Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (London:
Macmillan, 1999), pp. 275–311.

30. Robert Knox, Races of Men: a Philosophical Enquiry into the Inﬂuence of Race

over the Destinies of Nations (London: Renshaw, 1850), p. 456.

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Frankenstein and Devi’s Pterodactyl

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein emerges out of a particular conjuncture of
British class history. A text of nascent feminism, it remains cryptic, I
think, simply because it does not speak the language of feminist indi-
vidualism that we have come to hail as the language of high feminism
within English literature. Barbara Johnson’s brief study tries to rescue
this recalcitrant text for the service of feminist autobiography.

Alter-

natively, George Levine reads Frankenstein in the context of the creative
imagination and the nature of the hero. He sees the novel as a book
about its own writing and about writing itself, a Romantic allegory of
reading.

I propose to take Frankenstein out of this arena and focus on it in terms

of English cultural identity. Within that focus we are obliged to admit
that, although Frankenstein is ostensibly about the origin and evolution
of man in society, it does not deploy the axiomatics of imperialism for
crucial textual functions.

Let me say at once that there is plenty of incidental imperialist sen-

timent in Frankenstein. My point, within the argument of this essay, is
that the discursive ﬁeld of imperialism does not produce unquestioned
ideological correlatives for the narrative structuring of the book. The
discourse of imperialism surfaces in a curiously powerful way in
Shelley’s novel, and I will later discuss the moment at which it emerges.
Frankenstein, however, is not a battleground of male and female indi-
vidualism articulated in terms of sexual reproduction (family and
female) and social subject-production (race and male). That binary
opposition is undone in Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory – an artiﬁcial
womb where both projects are undertaken simultaneously, though the
terms are never openly spelled out. Frankenstein’s apparent antagonist
is God himself as Maker of Man, but his real competitor is also woman

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as the maker of children. It is not just that his dream of the death of
mother and bride and the actual death of his bride are associated with
the visit of his monstrous homoerotic ‘corpse’, unnatural because bereft
of a determinable childhood: ‘No father had watched my infant days,
no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all
my past was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished
nothing’.

It is Frankenstein’s own ambiguous and miscued under-

standing of the real motive for the monster’s vengefulness that reveals
his competition with woman as maker:

I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure,
as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my
duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties
towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my atten-
tion because they included a greater proportion of happiness or
misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to
create a companion for the ﬁrst creature.

(p. 206)

It is impossible not to notice the accents of transgression inﬂecting

Frankenstein’s demolition of his experiment to create the future Eve.
Even in the laboratory, the woman-in-the-making is not a bodied corpse
but ‘a human being’. The (il)logic of the metaphor bestows on her a
prior existence that Frankenstein aborts, rather than an anterior death
that he re-embodies: ‘The remains of the half-ﬁnished creature, whom
I had destroyed, lay scattered on the ﬂoor, and I almost felt as if I had
mangled the living ﬂesh of a human being’ (p. 163).

In Shelley’s view, man’s hubris as soul-maker both usurps the place of

God and attempts – vainly – to sublate woman’s physiological preroga-
tive.

Indeed, indulging a Freudian fantasy here, I could urge that, if to

give and withhold to/from the mother a phallus is the male fetish, then
to give and withhold to/from the man a womb might be the female
fetish in an impossible world of psychoanalytic equilibrium.

The icon

of the sublimated womb in man is surely his productive brain, the box
in the head.

In the judgment of classical psychoanalysis, the phallic mother exists

only by virtue of the castration-anxious son; in Frankenstein’s judgment,
the hysteric father (Victor Frankenstein gifted with his laboratory – the
womb of theoretical reason) cannot produce a daughter. Here the
language of racism – the dark side of imperialism understood as
social mission – combines with the hysteria of masculism into the

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idiom of (the withdrawal of) sexual reproduction rather than subject-
constitution; and is judged by the text. The roles of masculine and
feminine individualists are hence reversed and displaced. Frankenstein
cannot produce a ‘daughter’ because:

she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her
mate . . . [and because] one of the ﬁrst results of those sympathies
for which the demon thirsted would be children, and a race of
devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very
existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of
terror.

(p. 158)

This particular narrative strand also launches a thoroughgoing cri-

tique of the eighteenth-century European discourses on the origin of
society through (Western Christian) man. Should it be mentioned
that, much like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions, Frankenstein
declares himself to be ‘by birth a Genevese’ (p. 31)?

In this overtly didactic text, Shelley’s point is that social planning

should not be based on pure, theoretical, or natural-scientiﬁc reason
alone, which is her implicit critique of the utilitarian vision of an engi-
neered society. To this end, she presents in the ﬁrst part of her deliber-
ately schematic story three characters, childhood friends, who seem to
represent Kant’s three-part conception of the human subject: Victor
Frankenstein, the forces of theoretical reason or ‘natural philosophy’;
Henry Clerval, the forces of practical reason or ‘the moral relation of
things’; and Elizabeth Lavenza, that aesthetic judgment – ‘the aerial cre-
ation of the poets’ – which, according to Kant, is ‘a suitable mediating
link connecting the realm of the concept of nature and that of the
concept of freedom . . . (which) promotes . . . moral feeling’.

The three-part subject does not operate harmoniously. That Henry

Clerval, associated as he is with practical reason, should have as his
‘design . . . to visit India, in the belief that he had in his knowledge of
its various languages, and in the views he had taken of its society, the
means of materially assisting the progress of European colonization and
trade’ (pp. 151–2) is proof of this, as well as part of the incidental impe-
rialist sentiment of which I speak above. It should be pointed out that
the language here is entrepreneurial rather than missionary:

He came to the university with the design of making himself com-
plete master of the Oriental languages, as thus he should open a ﬁeld

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for the plan of life he had marked out for himself. Resolved to pursue
no inglorious career, he turned his eyes towards the East as afford-
ing scope for his spirit of enterprise. The Persian, Arabic, and
Sanskrit languages engaged his attention.

(pp. 66–7).

Yet it is, of course, Victor Frankenstein, with his strange itinerary of

obsession with natural philosophy, who offers the strongest demon-
stration that the multiple perspectives of the three-part Kantian subject
cannot co-operate harmoniously if woman and native informant are
allowed into the enclosure. Frankenstein creates a putative human
subject out of natural philosophy alone. According to his own miscued
summation: ‘In a ﬁt of enthusiastic madness I created a rational crea-
ture’ (p. 206). It is not at all far-fetched to say that Kant’s categorical
imperative can most easily be mistaken for the hypothetical imperative
– a command to ground in cognitive comprehension what can be appre-
hended only by moral will – by putting natural philosophy in the place
of practical reason.

I should hasten to add here that a reading such as this one does

not necessarily accuse Mary Shelley of writing a successful Kantian
allegory. The most I can say is that it is possible to read the novel,
within the frame of imperialism and the Kantian ethical moment,
in a politically useful way. Such an approach must naïvely presuppose
that a ‘disinterested’ reading attempts to render transparent the inter-
ests of the hegemonic readership. (Other ‘political’ readings – for
instance, that the monster is the nascent working class – can also be
advanced.)

Frankenstein is constructed in the established epistolary tradition of

multiple frames. At the heart of these, the narrative of the monster (as
reported by Frankenstein to Robert Walton, who then recounts it in a
letter to his sister) is of his almost learning, clandestinely, to be human.
It is invariably noticed that the monster reads Paradise Lost as true
history. What is not so often noticed is that he also reads Plutarch’s Lives,
‘the histories of the ﬁrst founders of the ancient republics’ (p. 123),
which he compares to the ‘patriarchal lives of my protectors’ (p. 124).
And his education comes through ‘Volney’s Ruins of Empires’, which pur-
ported to be a preﬁguration of the French Revolution, published after
the event and after the author had rounded off his theory with practice
(p. 113). Volney’s book is an attempt at an enlightened universal secular,
rather than a Eurocentric Christian, history, written from the perspec-
tive of a narrator ‘from below’.

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This Caliban’s education in (universal secular) humanity takes place

through the monster’s eavesdropping on the instruction of an Ariel-
Saﬁe, the Christianized ‘Arabian’ to whom ‘a residence in Turkey was
abhorrent’ (p. 121). In depicting Saﬁe, Shelley uses some commonplaces
of eighteenth-century liberalism that are shared by many today: Saﬁe’s
Muslim father was a victim of (bad) Christian religious prejudice and
yet was himself a wily and ungrateful man not as morally reﬁned as her
(good) Christian mother. Having tasted the emancipation of woman,
Saﬁe could not go home. The confusion between ‘Turk’ and ‘Arab’ also
has its counterpart today.

We will gain nothing by celebrating the time-bound pieties that

Shelley, the daughter of two anti-evangelicals, produces. It is more
interesting for us that Shelley differentiates the Other, works at the
Caliban/Ariel distinction, and cannot make the monster identical with
the proper recipient of these lessons. To me, this scrupulous distancing
is a mark of the book’s political importance. Although he had ‘heard of
the discovery of the American hemisphere and wept with Saﬁe over the
helpless fate of its original inhabitants’ (p. 114, emphasis mine), Saﬁe
cannot reciprocate his attachment. When she ﬁrst catches sight of him,
‘Saﬁe, unable to attend to her friend [Agatha], rushed out of the cottage’
(p. 129).

At one moment, in fact, Shelley’s Frankenstein does try to tame the

monster, to humanize him by bringing him within the circuit of the
law. He ‘repair[s] to a criminal judge in the town and . . . relate[s his]
history brieﬂy but with ﬁrmness’ (p. 189) – the ﬁrst and disinterested
version of the narrative of Frankenstein –

marking the dates with accuracy and never deviating into invective
or exclamation . . . When I had concluded my narration I said, ‘This
is the being whom I accuse and for whose seizure and punishment
I call upon you to exert your whole power. It is your duty as a
magistrate’.

(p. 190)

The sheer social reasonableness of the mundane voice of Shelley’s

‘Genevan magistrate’ reminds us that the radically other cannot be
selfed, that the monster has ‘properties’ that will not be contained by
‘proper’ measures: ‘I will exert myself’, he says

and if it is in my power to seize the monster, be assured that he shall
suffer punishment proportionate to his crimes. But I fear, from what

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you have yourself described to be his properties, that this will prove
impracticable; and thus, while every proper measure is pursued, you
should make up your mind to disappointment.

(p. 190)

In the end, as is obvious to most readers, distinctions of human indi-

viduality seem to fall away from the novel. Monster, Frankenstein and
Walton seem to become each other’s relays. Frankenstein’s story comes
to an end in death; Walton concludes his own story within the frame
of his function as letter-writer. In the narrative conclusion, he is the
natural philosopher who learns from Frankenstein’s example. At the end
of the text, the monster, having confessed his guilt toward his maker
and ostensibly intending to immolate himself, is borne away on an ice
raft. We do not see the conﬂagration of his funeral pile – the self-
immolation is not consummated in the text: he too cannot be con-
tained by the text. And to stage that non-containment is, I insist, one
of Frankenstein’s strengths. In terms of narrative logic, he is ‘lost in dark-
ness and distance’ (p. 211) – these are the last words of the novel – into
an existential temporality that is coherent with neither the terri-
torializing individual imagination, nor the authoritative scenario of
Christian psychobiography. The very relationship between sexual
reproduction and social subject-production – the dynamic nineteenth-
century topos of feminism-in-imperialism – remains problematic within
the limits of Shelley’s text and, paradoxically, constitutes its strength.

Earlier, I offered a reading of woman as womb-holder in Frankenstein.

I would now suggest that there is a framing woman in the book who
is neither tangential, nor encircled, nor yet encircling. ‘Mrs. Saville’
(p. 15), ‘excellent Margaret’ (p. 17), ‘beloved Sister’ (p. 22) are her
address and kinship inscription. She is the occasion, though not the
protagonist, of the novel. She is the feminine subject rather than
the female individualist: she is the irreducible recipient-function of the
letters that make up Frankenstein. Here the reader must read with Mar-
garet Saville in the crucial sense that she must intercept the recipient-
function, read the letters as recipient, in order for the novel to exist.

Margaret Saville does not respond to close the text as a frame. The frame
is thus simultaneously not a frame, and the monster can step ‘beyond
the text’ and be ‘lost in darkness’. Within the allegory of our reading,
the place of both the English lady and the unnamable monster are left
open by this great ﬂawed text. It is satisfying for a postcolonial reader
to consider this a noble resolution for a nineteenth-century English
novel. Shelley herself abundantly ‘identiﬁes’ with Victor Frankenstein.

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Shelley’s emancipatory vision cannot extend beyond the speculary sit-

uation of the colonial enterprise, where the master alone has a history,
master and subject are locked up in the cracked mirror of the present,
and the subject’s future, although indeﬁnite, is vectored speciﬁcally
both toward and away from the master. Within this restricted vision,
Shelley gives to the monster the right to refuse the withholding of the
master’s returned gaze – to refuse an apartheid of speculation, as it were:

I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee . . . How can
I move thee? . . . [He] placed his hated hands before my [Franken-
stein’s] eyes, which I ﬂung from me with violence; ‘thus I take from
thee a sight which you abhor. Still thou canst listen to me’.

(pp. 95, 96)

His request, not granted, is, as we have seen, for a gendered future, for
the colonial female subject.

I want now to advance the argument just a little further, and make a
contrasting point. The task of the postcolonial writer, the descendant
of the colonial female subject that history did in fact produce, cannot
be restrained within the specular master-slave enclosure so powerfully
staged in Frankenstein. I turn to Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Pterodactyl, Pirtha,
and Puran Sahay’ to measure out some of the differences between the
sympathetic and supportive colonial staging of the situation of the
refusal of the withholding of specular exchange in favour of the mon-
strous colonial subject; and the postcolonial performance of the con-
struction of the constitutional subject of the new nation, in subalternity
rather than, as most often by renaming the colonial subject, as citizen.

Devi’s work is focused on the so-called original inhabitants or ¯

adiv¯

asis

(and the formerly untouchable lowest Hindu castes) in India, over 80
million at last count, and massively under-reported in colonial and post-
colonial studies.

There are 300-odd divisions, most with an individual

language of their own, divided into four large language groups. I have
frequently made the obvious point that, in the interest of placing the
subaltern into hegemony – citizenship of the postcolonial state, con-
stitutional subjectship – the movement Devi is associated with imposes
a structural unity upon this vast group. This is an abuse of the Enlight-
enment rather than divisive identitarianism.

In ‘Pterodactyl’, Devi brings into the foreground this ab-usive (or cat-

achrestic – there is no literal referent for the concept ‘original Indian
nation’ or ¯

adim bh¯

aratiya j¯

ati) spirit of aboriginal unity in her postscript:

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[In this place no name – such as Madhya Pradesh or Nagesia – has
been used literally. Madhya Pradesh is here India, Nagesia village the
entire tribal society. I have deliberately conﬂated the ways – rules and
customs of different Austric tribes and groups, and the idea of the
ancestral soul is also my own. I have merely tried to express my esti-
mation, born of experience, of Indian aboriginal society, through the
myth of the pterodactyl.] – Mahasweta Devi.

At the end of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust writes at length of

the task before him – the writing, presumably, of the many-volumed
book that we have just ﬁnished. Devi’s gesture belongs to this topos.
After the experience of the entire novella, the author tells us that the
only authority in the story is rhetorical. She hands us the gift of a small
but crucial aporia, the truth-value of the story, as an interpolation within
square brackets, ‘the severe economy of a writing holding back decla-
ration within a discipline of severely observed markers.’

This truth is

not exactitude. We cannot ‘learn about’ the subaltern only by reading
literary texts, or, mutatis mutandis, socio-historical documents. ‘It is just
that there be law, but law is not justice.’

It is responsible to read books,

but book learning is not responsibility.

The native informant is not a catachresis here, but quite literally the

person who feeds anthropology. The closing note of the novella tells us
that the author will not be one of these. In the story itself there are at
least two powerful ﬁgures who cannot be appropriated into that per-
spective. Part of that immunity to appropriation comes through the
theme of the resistance to development (hinted at in the interstices of
my reading of Marx) as aboriginal resistance. The most extreme case is
that of Shankar, who could rather easily have ﬁlled the bill for an
authentic native informant, but to whom the very suggestion would be
irrelevant:

‘I can’t see you. But I say to you in great humility, you can’t do any-
thing for us. We became unclean as soon as you entered our lives.
No more roads, no more relief – what will you give to a people in
exchange for the vanished land, home ﬁeld, burial-ground?’ Shankar
comes up close and says, ‘Can you move far away? Very far? Very,
very far?’

(p. 120)

Devi stages the workings of the postcolonial state with minute knowl-

edge, anger and loving despair.

There are suppressed dissident radicals,

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there is the national government seeking electoral publicity, there are
systemic bureaucrats beneath good and evil, subaltern state functionar-
ies to whom the so-called Enlightenment principles of democracy are
counter-intuitive. Then there is the worst product of postcoloniality, the
Indian who uses the alibis of development to exploit the tribals and
destroy their life-system. Over against him is the handful of conscien-
tious and understanding government workers who operate through a
system of ofﬁcial sabotage and small compromises. The central ﬁgure is
Puran Sahay, a journalist. (Devi herself, in addition to being an ecology-
health-literacy activist and a ﬁction writer, is also an indefatigable inter-
ventionist journalist.)

The conception of Puran’s private life, delicately inscribed within the

gender-emancipation of domestic society among the committed section
of the metropolitan and urban lower middle class, would merit a sepa-
rate discussion. In the novella he leaves this frame scenario to climb the
Pirtha hills and descend into the Pirtha valley, aboriginal terrain in
development. (This ‘unframing’ of Puran may also be a ‘liminalizing’.)
The fruit of his travels is the kind of organizing reportage that Devi
herself undertakes, in the form of a report for his ally, Harisharan. We
do not see the more public report he will write for the newspaper
Dibasjyoti. There is also a report not (to be) sent, but ‘sent’ to the extent
that it is available in the literary space of the novella, that challenges
each claim of the decolonizing state with a vignette from these hills.

Like the monster in Frankenstein, Puran too steps away from the nar-

rative of this tale, but into action within the postcolonial new nation:
‘A truck comes by. Puran raises his hand, steps up’ (p. 196).

I have so far summarized a story involving subaltern freedom in the

new nation. But that story is also a frame. Before I proceed to disclose
the curious heart of the story, let me remind the reader that the indige-
nous caste-Hindu non-elite self-‘free’ing women, Saraswati, Puran’s
woman-friend, and the wives of the other committed workers, wait
in the frame outside this one. The narrative of subaltern freedom and
even middle-level indigenous female (self-)emancipation cannot yet be
continuous.

The heart, then: a story of funeral rites, and through it the initiation

of Puran, the interventionist journalist, into a subaltern responsibility
that is at odds (asymptotic, asymmetrical, aporetic, out of discursivity,
différend) with the ﬁght for rights. An aboriginal boy has drawn the
picture of a pterodactyl on the cave wall. Puran and a ‘good’ govern-
ment ofﬁcer do not allow this to become public. No native informant,
again. Through his unintentionally successful ‘prediction’ of rain, Puran

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becomes part of the group’s ongoing historical record. He sees the ptero-
dactyl. Or, perhaps, the pterodactyl reveals itself to him in the peculiar
corporeality of the spectre.

If the exchange between the nameless monster (without history) and

Victor Frankenstein is a ﬁnally futile refusal of withheld specularity, the
situation of the gaze between pterodactyl (before history) and a
‘national’ history that holds aboriginal and non-aboriginal together is
somewhat different. There can be no speculation here; in a textual space
rhetorically separated from the counter-factual funeral, the aboriginal
and the non-aboriginal must pull together. Here is Puran as the ptero-
dactyl looks, perhaps at him:

You are moveless with your wings folded, I do not wish to touch you,
you are outside my wisdom, reason, and feelings, who can place his
hand on the axial moment of the end of the third phase of the
Mesozoic and the beginnings of the Kenozoic geological ages? . . .
What do its eyes want to tell Puran? . . . There is no communication
between eyes. Only a dusky waiting, without end. What does it want
to tell: We are extinct by the inevitable natural geological evolution.
You too are endangered. You too will become extinct in nuclear
explosions, or in war, or in the aggressive advance of the strong as it
obliterates the weak . . . think if you are going forward or back . . .
What will you ﬁnally grow in the soil, having murdered nature in
the application of man-imposed substitutes? . . . The dusky lidless
eyes remain unresponsive.

(pp. 156–7)

For the modern Indian the pterodactyl is an empirical impossibility.

For the modern aboriginal Indian the pterodactyl may be the soul of
the ancestors, as imagined by the author, who has placed her signature
outside the frame.

The ﬁction does not judge between the registers of

truth and exactitude, but simply stages them in separate spaces. This is
not science ﬁction. And the pterodactyl is not a symbol.

The pterodactyl dies and Bikhia, the boy struck dumb – withdrawn

from communication by becoming the pterodactyl’s ‘guardian’, its
‘priest’ – buries it in the underground caverns of the river, walls resplen-
dent with ‘undiscovered’ cave paintings, perhaps ancient, perhaps con-
temporary. The aboriginal is not put in a museum in this text. He allows
Puran to accompany him. The burial itself is unlike current practice.
Now, Shankar says, they burn bodies, like Hindus: ‘We bury the ash and
receive a stone. I’ve heard that we buried the bodies in the old days.’

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And this memory is contained, of course, within the imagination of an
imagined identity, ﬁctive practices. This mourning is not anthropologi-
cal but ethico-political. (Puran has situated his study of anthropology,
transcodings of the native informant’s speech, as useful but unequal to
these encounters.)

Puran, a caste-Hindu, remote stranger in a now Hindu-majority land,

earns the right to assist at the laying-to-rest of a previous aboriginal civ-
ilization, itself catachrestic when imagined as a unity, in a rhetorical
space textually separate from a frame narrative that may as well be the
central narrative, of the separate agendas of tribal and journalistic resis-
tances to development, each aporetic to the other, the site of a dilemma.

The funeral lament, the unreal elegy that must accompany all begin-

nings, is placed at the end of the narrative, just before Puran hops on
the truck, and the postscript signed by the author begins. The subject
of the elegy is suspended between journalist-character and author ﬁgure:

Puran’s amazed heart discovers what love for Pirtha there is in his
heart, perhaps he cannot remain a distant spectator anywhere in life.
Pterodactyl’s eyes. Bikhiya’s eyes. Oh ancient civilization, the foun-
dation and ground of the civilization of India, oh ﬁrst sustaining civ-
ilization, we are in truth defeated. A continent! We destroyed it
undiscovered, as we are destroying the primordial forest, water, living
beings, the human. A truck comes by. Puran raises his hand, steps up.

(p. 196)

In my estimation ‘Pterodactyl’ is necessarily bound by the reach of the
European novel. We have no choice but to allow the literary imagina-
tion its promiscuities. But if, as critics, we wish to reopen the epistemic
fracture of imperialism without succumbing to the nostalgia for lost
origins, we must turn to the archives of imperialist governance.

Notes

1. Barbara Johnson, ‘My Monster/My Self’, Diacritics 12 (Summer 1982), 2–10.
2. Mary Poovey, ‘My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of

Romanticism’, PMLA, 5, 95, 3 (May 1980), 332–47. See also George Levine,
The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 23–35.

3. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (New York: New

American Library, 1965), p. 115. All subsequent references are to this edition,
and are given in parentheses in the text.

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4. In the late 1980s, I had suggested that the reader consult the publications

of the Feminist International Network for the best overview of the current
debate on reproductive technology. I would now suggest following, on the
one hand, UN publications, and on the other FINRRAGE. In the ﬁnal analy-
sis, there is no substitute for ﬁeld reports by local women. A Critique of Post-
colonial Reason ends with a tiny bit of that with respect to child labour.

5. For the male fetish, see Freud, ‘Fetishism’, in The Standard Edition of the Com-

plete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton,
1961–76), pp. 152–7. For a more ‘serious’ Freudian study of Frankenstein,
see Mary Jacobus, ‘Is There a Woman in this Text?’ New Literary History 14
(Autumn 1982), 117–41. My ‘fantasy’ would of course be disproved by the
‘fact’ that the opposition male/female is asymmetrical, and that it is more
difﬁcult for a woman to assume the position of fetishist than for a man; see
Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Specta-
tor’, Screen 23 (Sept.–Oct. 1982), 74–87. Again, another category ‘mistake’. I
had written the above before undertaking a study of Melanie Klein. I should
do without the apology now. I have expanded this point of view in Spivak,
‘ “Circumfession”: My Story as the (M)other’s Story’, forthcoming.

6. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H. Howard (New York:

Hafner Press), pp. 36, 37, 39.

7. Constantin Francois Chasseboeuf de Volney, The Ruins; or, Meditations on the

Revolutions of Empires, (London: n.p., 1811). In Time and the Other, Johannes
Fabian has showed us the manipulation of time in ‘new’ secular histories
of a similar kind. The most striking ignoring of the monster’s education
through Volney is in Sandra Gilbert’s otherwise brilliant ‘Horror’s Twin: Mary
Shelley’s Monstrous Eve’, Feminist Studies 4 (June 1980). Her subsequent work
has most convincingly ﬁlled in such lacunae; see, for example, her piece on
H. Rider Haggard’s She (‘Rider Haggard’s Heart of Darkness’, Partisan Review
50, 3 [1983]: 444–53).

8. ‘A letter is always and a priori intercepted . . . the “subjects” are neither the

senders nor the receivers of messages . . . The letter is constituted by its inter-
ception’. Jacques Derrida, ‘Discussion’, after Claude Rabant, ‘II n’a aucune
chance de l’entendre’, in Affranchissement du transfert et de la lettre, ed. Rene
Major (Paris: Confrontation, 1981), p. 106; my translation. Margaret Saville
is made to appropriate the reader’s ‘subject’ into the signature of her own
‘individuality’.

9. The most striking internal evidence is the ‘Author’s Introduction’ that,

after dreaming of the yet-unnamed Victor Frankenstein ﬁgure and being
terriﬁed (through, yet not yet quite through, him) by the monster in a
scene she later reproduced in Frankenstein’s story; Shelley began her tale
‘on the morrow with the words “It was on a dreary night of November” ’
(p. xi). Those are the opening words of Chapter 5 of the ﬁnished book,
where Frankenstein begins to recount the actual making of his monster
(p. 56).

10. It should be mentioned that Mahasweta Devi’s work is by no means repre-

sentative of contemporary Bengali (or Indian) ﬁction and therefore cannot
serve as an example of Jamesonian ‘third world literature’.

11. Dhirendranath Baske, Paschimbanger Adibasi Samaj (Calcutta: Shubarnorekha,

1987), vol. 1, projected from p. 17.

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12. Mahasweta Devi, ‘Pterodactyl, Pirtha and Puran Sahay’ in Imaginary Maps,

trans G.C. Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 95–196, at p. 196, trans-
lation modiﬁed. The catachresis involved in ‘original Indian nation’ is not
just that there is no one ‘tribe’ including all aboriginals resident in what
is now ‘India’. It is also that the concept ‘India’ is itself not ‘Indian’, and
further, not identical with the concept Bha¯rata, just as ‘nation’ and ja¯ti have
different histories. Furthermore, the sentiment of an entire nation as place
of origin is not a statement within aboriginal discursive formations, where
locality is of much greater importance. I point this out in some detail
because, ﬁrst, the word catachresis is one of the worst offenders in the general
crime of inaccessibility – second, even the most hegemonic identity would
show itself to be catachrestic under close scrutiny; and, ﬁnally, the (ab)use
of the Enlightenment in the interest of building a civil society brings the
subaltern discursive formation into crisis, makes it deconstruct. It should also
be mentioned that the word ‘tribal’ although no longer internationally
favoured because of the African situation, may still be found in domestic
usage in India, where the word is used over against ‘caste’.

13. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey

Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),
p. 32.

14. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: the Mystical Foundation of Authority’ in

Common Law Review: Reconstruction and the Possibility of Justice 11, 5–6 (1990),
920–1045, at 947.

15. Devi joined the legendary undivided Communist Party of India in 1942. She

has been as much a part of the anti-colonial struggles as she has been witness
to the failure of decolonization. There is little ‘colonial discourse’ writing
in her ﬁction. In ‘Choli ka pichhe’ (‘Behind the Bodice’), in Devi, The Breast
Stories, trans. Spivak (Calcutta: Seagull, 1997), p. 140, there is a brilliantly
ironic moment which is opposed to the laying of all the ills of contempo-
rary society at the door of British colonialism.

16. A small moment in the text which contributes to Puran’s liminalization. But

it is the denial of such differences which can give rise to the global sister-
hood required for the ﬁnancialization of the globe. Who is silenced by the
female hero? (See pp. 353–421, the last movement of the book.)

17. Jaques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt and the New International,

trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 6 and passim.

18. For the labyrinthine dynamics of the author’s signature promising that (the

gift of) the text is factually counterfeit, see Jacques Derrida, Given Time, trans.
Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 107–72. The
interest here is not merely ‘speculative’. It has something like a relationship
with the fact that, reading literature, we learn to learn from the singular and
the unveriﬁable.

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Pushkin and Odoevsky: the ‘Afro-
Finnish’ Theme in Russian Gothic

Neil Cornwell

Where the Finnish ﬁsherman,
Nature’s sad foster child,
Alone on the low banks
Would cast in unknown waters
His old net, now
The animated banks
Are crowded with the tall masses
Of palaces and towers . . . .

(Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman)

The question of colonialism in nineteenth-century Russian literature is
usually associated with the Caucasus, especially since the publication in
1994 of Susan Layton’s study, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of
the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy. Discussion of this whole issue has
been somewhat broadened since Layton’s book, particularly with the
appearance of Ewa M. Thompson’s radical study, Imperial Knowledge:
Russian Literature and Colonialism (2000). The political situation in the
Caucasus, of course, remains unﬁnished business, and a problem that
is still very much with post-Soviet Russia today. However, a colonial war
had also been fought with Sweden over Finland at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, coinciding with the founding by Peter the Great of
the city of St Petersburg. This episode, its prehistory and its aftermath,
is revisited in an unusual Gothic-folkloric manner by Vladimir
Odoevsky, in his ‘dilogy’ (a double-tale) of 1841, eventually known as
The Salamander (Salamandra). Contributions to the Russo-Swedo-Finnish
historical theme had been made earlier in Russian literature in the
eighteenth century and, more particularly, in the 1820s by Evgenii
Baratynsky and Aleksandr Pushkin.

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Out of the Kievan principality, founded according to the chronicles by
Varangians (Vikings – including, it is thought, some Finnish speakers)
under Rurik in the ninth century who converted to the Greek form of
Christianity in the tenth, there subsequently emerged the more cen-
tralized state of Muscovy. Having thrown off the so-called Tatar Yoke,
the Moscow-centred power, stretching from Novgorod in the north to
Kiev in the south, reverted to the name ‘Rus’, and, in the early ﬁfteenth
century, its ruler adopted the title of tsar (or Caesar). Conscious of
its Byzantine heritage, and fortiﬁed by the notion of Moscow as ‘the
Third Rome’, Rus was soon pursuing a policy of territorial aggrandise-
ment – sooner or later, in all directions. Unlike many empires, it has
been noted, Russia chose to concentrate on adjacent lands or, in Ewa
Thompson’s words, developed ‘an imperial appetite for colonial pos-
sessions contiguous to ethnic Russia’.

Conquests over Tatars and Turks

to the south, and Poland-Lithuania to the west, as well as expansion to
the east (towards Siberia), were followed by rivalry with Sweden, the
main military power of northern Europe, which culminated in the Great
Northern War (1700–21). Peter the Great, the victor in this conﬂict,
opening his ‘window to the west’ and founding his Baltic capital,
assumed the Latinized title of imperator and began a programme of
Westernization and attempted modernization, which were further
pursued by Catherine the Great in the second half of the eighteenth
century.

Annexation and assimilation (both political and cultural) were key

aspirations of the regime. In the mid-eighteenth century, however, at a
time of diplomatic rapprochement, Russia – imperial aspirations notwith-
standing – voluntarily underwent a process of reverse cultural im-
perialism by adopting French as the working and social language of
court and aristocracy (by now largely a ‘serving nobility’, replacing or
augmenting the old boyar elite who claimed descent from Rurik). This
served, apart from anything else, as ‘an aristocratic badge of class’.

One

historical philologist speaks of the Russian aristocracy going through ‘a
veritable fever’ of French imitation in the second half of that century:
indeed, ‘it became almost obligatory in aristocratic homes to have the
children instructed in French from the outset, and the habit of speak-
ing and reading French trained them even to think in French’.

This

‘passable gallicization’ – in many ways a surprisingly neglected aspect
of Russian cultural history – thus reached its peak around the turn of
the nineteenth century, but received a fatal setback with the Napoleonic

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invasion and, in more general cultural terms, underwent what Martin
Malia terms a ‘collapse of Russia’s Gallic Enlightenment with the
Decembrist adventure’.

Nevertheless, the usage of French survived in

court circles and the practice of employing foreign tutors to the
children of the elite continued until the Revolution.

Meanwhile, the gains made by Catherine, followed by the events of

the Napoleonic era, meant that, from 1814, Russia’s western frontiers
were now ﬁxed in a manner that was to last until the Great War of
1914–18. As a main victor of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars,
Russia assumed, from the Congress of Vienna, its most commanding
position yet as a European power. Russia’s European policy was now to
defend these existing frontiers, and indeed the established status quo
in Europe, through the Holy Alliance. The colonial acquisition of the
Caucasus continued unabated. The later years of Alexander I, and the
accession of Nicholas I – which was greeted by the unsuccessful ‘Decem-
brist’ revolt (of 14 December, 1825) carried out by more liberal elements
of the nobility – together with repression in Poland and an implacable
posture towards the European reform movements of 1830, ushered in
a period of bleak reaction, at home and abroad, which was to last until
its temporary and partial alleviation in the next reign, in the wake of
military humiliation in Crimea. It was in this period that the spectre of
a Russian menace was perceived to arise over Europe; the second quarter
of the nineteenth century (the period in which the works of immedi-
ate interest to us were written) has been called ‘the age par excellence
of black literature about Russia’.

It may not be coincidental, however,

that this was precisely the period in which Russian literature ﬁrst began
to assert itself as a serious European cultural force.

On its northern ﬂank, Russia had chieﬂy prosecuted the acquisition

of Finland and adjacent Baltic coastal territories at the expense of the
Swedes, who had taken advantage of the Mongol invasions of Russia to
push to the Neva. The Treaty of Täysinä in 1595 brought to an end one
long period of conﬂict, largely resulting in the repulsion of the Russians
and leaving an Arctic frontier and taxation rights favourable to Sweden,
plus Swedish possession of Estonia.

The Russians, who had founded

isolated northern Orthodox monasteries to convert the Lapps, retained
limited territorial and ﬁshing rights. In Karelia too, Finnish speakers had
‘acquired their Orthodox form of Christianity from Byzantium, via
Novgorod’.

The spread of Swedish (Lutheran) cultural inﬂuence in the

seventeenth century, when Finland was governed as ‘simply a group of
Swedish provinces’, was widely resented, particularly among Russian
Orthodox sections of the Finnish population, many of whom decamped

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to Russian-held territory during the ﬁghting of 1656–57.

The Great

Northern War enabled the foundation of St Petersburg in 1703 ‘at the
outskirts of the empire’ – ‘the future capital amidst the Finnish marshes’,
as Peter the Great opened his window to Europe; it also led to the
Russian occupation of Finland, remembered as ‘the Great Wrath’.

Russian occupational repression at this time competed with the long-
standing Swedish policy of conscription: half of Charles XII’s troops
raising the siege of Narva had been Finns.

The Treaty of Nystad (1721)

ended the Russian occupation of Finland, but forced vital Baltic coastal
territorial concessions from the Swedes and left Russia as the major
northern power.

Further hostilities broke out in 1741–43 (there was a ‘Lesser Wrath’ of

1742), leading to some further Russian gains, and again in 1788–90. In
the middle of the diplomatic and military maelstrom of the Napoleonic
era, Russian armies again overran Finland, though this time they
encountered hostility both from the Swedish nobility and the Finnish
peasantry. The settlement of 1809 led to the absorption of a Grand
Duchy of Finland within the Russian Empire, although with a strong
level of local legal and institutional autonomy. Alexander I handed back
to the Grand Duchy the territories annexed by the treaties of 1721 and
1743. The ﬁnal break with Sweden and the relative autonomy under
tsarist Russia achieved, after initial guerrilla resistance, a reasonable
level of acceptance. However, a Russian garrison remained stationed in
Finland and many Finns later served in the Russian army in Finnish
military units – helping (ironically, it may seem) in the suppression of
the Polish revolts of 1830 and 1863.

In nineteenth-century Russian imperial Finland, some 85 per cent of

the population counted themselves as Finnish-speaking; the remainder,
mainly of the middle and upper classes, claimed Swedish as their mother
tongue, and this remained the main administrative language; Russian,
from 1809, was used in the Governor General’s ofﬁce and in com-
munications with St Petersburg only.

Systematic russiﬁcation was not

introduced until the unwise attempts made near the end of the century.
The Finno-Russian frontier, traditionally an oscillating blur, was now
ﬁxed, and it remained in place from 1812 until the Winter War of
1939–40, one of the events that unfolded from the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact.

Such was the historical-political background to the works of Russian

literature now to be perused. However, a few further cultural points
still need to be made. Otto Boele, in his study The North in Russian
Romantic Literature, sees the locus of the foundation of St Petersburg

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as emblematic of a larger process, by which ‘the North turned into a
vehicle for the expression of Russia’s “new” europeanized identity’, in
place of the East, ‘symbol of the old non-European Russia!’.

‘Since the

eighteenth century was infatuated with science and technology’, Boele
continues, ‘the northern light [aurora borealis] would eventually prove
to be a far more powerful metaphor for the new orientation (the ‘light’
of science) than the spiritual light of the East [Ex oriente lux]’.

With

the reforming and technological emphases, therefore, of Peter the Great,
‘a minority starts to emerge which partakes of a different culture than
the rest of the population’, among which small group (largely made
up of merchants, self-made men, and Russianized foreigners) ‘the
North takes precedence over the East as the embodiment of Russian
distinctiveness’.

Featuring within, or assimilated into, this ‘North’ was at least

some notion of Sweden-Finland.

The literary-historical depiction of

this region had resulted in cultural stereotypes: of the Swede as the
‘stubborn enemy’ (upornyi nepriatel, from Batiushkov’s ‘Excerpt from a
Russian Ofﬁcer’s Letter on Finland’, of 1809) and the Finn as the ‘sad
foster child of nature’ (Pushkin’s pechal’nyi pasynok prirody – see the
epigraph to this essay, page 69); overall the Finn was stereotyped as ‘the
aboriginal of the North’.

By the early-nineteenth century, the period

to which we now turn, Boele argues, ‘particular circles in Russian society
came to develop a “hardy” national self-image which was mirrored by
the “effeminate” heteroimage of the French’; the Other was conceptu-
alized as ‘Southern’ (not forgetting, of course, here too the Caucasus),
or as ‘Northern, but alien’.

The Swede, then, was consistently seen as

the enemy, but, as such, ‘in terms of equality’; the Finn, however, in
more classic ‘lazy native’ mode, was seen as victim, both of war and
nature, and as defenceless impoverished local, lacking in ambition, or
a bystander, engaged in the standard Finnish occupation of ﬁsherman
– a primitive representative of ‘the ultimate northern people’.

Let us now see these themes and images reﬂected in literary works that
take us into Romanticism and Gothicism. Firdous Azim reminds us that
‘the Gothic mode subverts and challenges the presuppositions of the
realistic school, disturbing the easy narrative of growth that capitalist
[and imperialist] ideology would have liked to provide for its subjects’.

References to Finland were to be found in works by Lomonosov and
Derzhavin, as well as, naturally enough, in Karamzin’s History of the

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Russian State. Konstantin Batiushkov and the cavalry-poet Denis
Davydov had served in the campaign that preceded the constitutional
arrangement of 1809 and left their own remarks on Finland. The
metaphysical poet Fedor Glinka, who had fought in the Napoleonic
campaigns as early as 1805–6, yet lived until 1880, was exiled in 1826,
for Decembrist associations, to Russian Karelia, where he produced his
northern narrative ‘tales in verse’, such as The Maid of the Karelian Forests
(Deva karel’skikh lesov, written from 1828).

However, more authentic

‘Finnish’ works of Russian literature came from Evgenii Baratynsky, who
experienced what he felt to be his own ‘Finnish exile’, serving there in
the Russian garrison from 1820 to 1825.

In the early elegy Finland (Finliandia, 1820), Baratynsky creates a

barren and timeless atmospheric picture of granite stones, standing like
‘bogatyrs on guard’ (Bogatyri storozhevye: shades of the byliny of the
Russian north), in a blurred but wild locality, peopled only with the
shadows of forgotten heroes – ‘the land of Odin’s children’.

Such a

geographical, historical and mythological pan-Scandinavian blur is,
then, in itself typical of Russian perceptions of Finland in the times pre-
ceding the 1835 publication of the Kalevala. Of yet further Romantic
and imperial interest, though, is Baratynsky’s more mature narrative
poem Eda (written 1824–25; revised 1832).

The plot of Eda is simple enough; the eponymous Finnish peasant

girl (whose name presumably owes something to the Icelandic eddaic
poetry) is seduced and abandoned by a (nameless) Russian hussar who
is billeted on her family (according to Baratynsky’s 1826 preface) on
the eve of the 1807–9 campaign. As such, to those familiar with Russian
literature, it evokes comparison with Karamzin’s sentimentalist tale
Poor Liza (Bednaia Liza, 1792) and Pushkin’s more nearly contempo-
raneous Byronic ‘southern’ narrative poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus
(Kavkazskii plennik, 1821), to which it may seem a northern analogue,
‘told in a toned-down Byronic manner’.

It also, in some respects,

anticipates the ‘Bela’ episode of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (Geroi
nashego vremeni, 1840) and the same poet’s eponymous Demon. In all
four cases an indigenous heroine perishes as a result of relations with
an apparently callous Russian colonizing ofﬁcer (or, in the last instance,
an invasive supernatural entity).

A standard literary-Romantic reading apart,

Eda is open to feminist

and philosophical interpretations,

but may clearly be subject as well

to an imperialist, or post-colonial reading.

The invader, his ‘victory’

(the militaristic pobeda)

and the motivation of Eda’s abandonment

through the treacherous machinations of the ‘the violent Swede’,

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together with the frequent merging of heroine with landscape, cumu-
latively suggest the symbolic rape of Finland by an anonymous and
unfeeling Russia.

Having ﬁnally ‘plunged her face into the dust / With

a silent moan of mortal agony’, Eda seems set to join ‘in the earthy dust
the cast-down faces of their gods’ and mythic heroes invoked in the
earlier Finland.

Also of subsequent interest to us is the hussar’s quasi-

incestuous longings, in the poem’s opening lines, for his ‘sister of won-
drous beauty’.

Eda does have a voice, in several passages of speech and

thought, though the impact of this may be compromised to an extent
by what Luc J. Beaudoin terms ‘narrative transvestism’ and ‘narratorial
intrusion’, or fusions in point of view.

Such elements of ambiguity are

likely to be reinforced by a consideration of the poem’s epilogue.

The epilogue to Eda, which was not published in Baratynsky’s life-

time, refers explicitly to the historical background, giving sympathy to
‘the fallen people’, reviving the contrived poetical landscape of Finland,
alluding to Finnish peasant resistance, yet celebrating the comprehen-
sive defeat of Sweden and referring to the enforced recognition by that
power of ‘the eagle of Poltava’. In the ﬁnal lines, Baratynsky, as a mere
peacetime poet, defers to the right of a genuine participant in these
events, the warrior-bard Davydov, complete with his hero’s laurels, to
sing of such exploits. Such tones struck both Baratynsky and the cen-
sorship as ambivalent. This seems particularly so when this epilogue is
compared to the strident tones of its counterpart in Pushkin’s The Pris-
oner of the Caucasus.

This particular example of what has been termed

‘the imperial sublime’ was criticized privately by another poet of the
Pushkin pleiad, Petr Viazemsky, who saw it as ‘anachronistic rapture’
and objected to poetry becoming ‘the ally of butchers’.

Baratynsky’s

epilogue may thus be considered a contribution to this hushed polemic
and an implied ironic reproof to the chivalric values of (the still active)
Davydov.

Eda, then, harks back to the process of the Russian Empire’s acquisi-

tion of Finland, but is written and published (revised and republished)
at a slightly later stage, from a standpoint of imperial status quo. The
allusion to ‘the eagle of Poltava’ points back to that battle of 1708 – a
key turning-point in the struggle for Baltic supremacy and a high point
of Russian northern imperial history – and on to Pushkin’s attempted
heroic epic, or ‘glaring and assertive hymn to Russian nationalism’

celebration of that event, Poltava (1828).

Here the Ukraine, considered

as a Russian province, replaces Finland, and the ageing local Hetman,
Mazeppa, engages in a Gothic-type romance with a maiden smitten
with improbable love for him (as he is about to behead her father), while

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‘betraying’ Peter the Great in alliance with Charles XII.

This particu-

lar variant of forbidden love contrasts with other Romantic manifesta-
tions of that phenomenon, and with Byron’s treatment of the same
protagonist (at a far more youthful stage) in his poem Mazeppa of 1818.
In another pre-Pushkinian treatment of the Mazeppa theme, Voinarovsky
(1825), by the soon-to-be-hanged Decembrist leader Konstantin Ryleev,
Mazeppa (and his nephew Voinarovsky) are treated as Ukrainian patri-
ots in a narrative delivered (in ﬂashback) from Siberia.

The poem was

published only with cuts, changes, an imposed preface and interlinear
annotations, to ‘correct’ the historical perspective.

One further Russian work of the period is the poorly esteemed

historical novel Mazepa (1833–4) by the Polish-born journalist and
writer Faddei Bulgarin.

Surprisingly, perhaps, for the work of a man

remembered mainly as a creature of the autocratic establishment,
Bulgarin’s novel is held to be, in its ideological and historical approach,
less one-sided than (in their respective ways) the preceding works by
Ryleev and Pushkin. This has been put down in part at least to his
attempts to emulate Scott as master of the historical novel; from Scott
too, and from an earlier Russian model, Karamzin’s tale of Nordic incest,
The Island Bornholm (Ostrov Borngol’m, 1794), Bulgarin seems to have
drawn certain Gothic features.

Azim writes of Beckford’s Vathek: ‘the

Gothic combines the novel of sentiment, the novel of adventure and
the Oriental tale to create a form where the dangers of and a notion
of dangerous sexuality become its main focus’; with the adjective
‘northern’ (or Scandinavian) substituted for ‘oriental’, this statement
could equally cover Karamzin’s Danish tale and Odoevsky’s Finnish
dilogy The Salamander.

III

In the same year that he wrote Poltava, Pushkin was turning to prose,
to compose a historical romance – loosely based on the life of his own
great-grandfather, Abram Hannibal, an Ethiopian captured as a boy by
the Turks, acquired in Constantinople by the Russian ambassador and
sent as a gift to Peter the Great – subsequently entitled The Blackamoor
of Peter the Great (Arap Petra Velikogo, 1827–28; published 1837).

The

text breaks off abruptly in its seventh chapter. Ibrahim, as Pushkin
names his protagonist, having sojourned amid amorous diversion in the
bosom of Parisian high society, returns to his imperial benefactor in St
Petersburg and is betrothed to a boyar’s daughter (Peter’s initiative to
integrate his protégé into the society of the Russian capital).

Peter, here

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depicted in more domestic circumstances, is still alluded to as ‘the hero
of Poltava’ and ‘the mighty and dread transformer of Russia’, consonant
with the work’s epigraph, and one minor character introduced is a
captive Swedish ofﬁcer, resident in the boyar’s palace.

Vladimir Odoevsky’s The Salamander enjoys a curious ‘dilogical’ (or

double-novella) structure.

Its constituent parts were ﬁrst published

separately, both in 1841, as ‘The Southern Shore of Finland at the Begin-
ning of the Eighteenth Century’ and ‘The Salamander’ respectively; in
1844 the second part was renamed ‘Elsa’ and The Salamander became
the overall title. Dealing, in its ﬁrst part, with a Finnish orphan dis-
placed during the Great Northern War and taken under Peter the Great’s
wing, The Salamander treats occult-folkloric Finnish themes before
developing, in its second part, into a tale of monetary greed, forbidden
sexuality and alchemical frenzy. Dubbed with some justice Odoevsky’s
‘The Finn of Peter the Great’, Odoevsky’s tale may clearly be seen as
analogous to Pushkin’s The Blackamoor.

Details traceable to Poltava and

The Bronze Horseman (and indeed to The Queen of Spades [Pikovaia dama],
1834) also play a part.

However, Odoevsky envelops these elements in

his own appropriation of a mystical Romanticism acquired from the
European literary and esoteric traditions, and proceeds to an elaborate
Gothicization of his imperial theme.

The Salamander is – his philosophical frame-tale-novel Russian

Nights (Russkie nochi, 1844) excepted – Odoevsky’s longest work of prose
ﬁction, comprising a quintessentially Romantic mixture of styles, genres
and narrational techniques. The ‘dilogical’ division, while preserving a
genuine continuation in narrative terms, signals a radical leap as regards
narrator, chronological standpoint and generic emphasis; it also shifts
the main locus of action from St Petersburg to Moscow.

Original drafts

had indicated a tale of alchemy set in medieval Italy, displaced through
the Inquisition to Germany and France.

This Gothic theme, intro-

ducing a Faustian alchemical quest, blurs into the lost primitive sorcery
of the ancients (here represented by the Finns, ‘a people of antiquity
who have been brought forward to our epoch’) and Finnish legend –
now (though only since 1835)

known from The Kalevala. From early-

eighteenth-century Finland, by way of a St Petersburg ‘which had only
just risen from the Finnish marshes’, we are projected forward to a
Moscow ghost story of the 1830s, in which echoes of this imperial past
– and present – may be coming home to roost.

In Part I, from the rugged Finnish setting of the opening and the

atmospherics of ‘A Finnish Legend’ – a remarkable mythic depiction of
the ongoing Great Northern War in the spirit of Finnish folklore and

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storytelling,

heavily indebted to the Finnish studies of Iakov Grot

–

the action moves to the defamiliarized new city of St Petersburg. Yakko,
the adopted son of a poor ﬁshing family (Odoevsky here combines two
standard Finnish stereotypes) caught up in the Russo-Swedish conﬂict,
is witness to the clairvoyant powers of his foster-sister Elsa, utilized by
her grandfather Rusi (stereotyped too as ‘a cunning Finn’) to divine in
the ﬁre the fate of her father at the hands of the Swedes.

Brought to

St Petersburg by Zverev, a young Russian ofﬁcer, he is educated in
Holland (with Peter the Great ‘attentively watching over his develop-
ing abilities’) in the care of Zverev’s family, before returning to Russia
to ﬁnd favoured service as a specialist in typography: ‘the half wild Finn,
under the mighty hand of Peter, was to become one of the instruments
of Russian enlightenment’.

Now called ‘Ivan Ivanovich Yakko’,

returns to Finland to seek out the ‘almost half wild’ Elsa and takes her
back to St Petersburg.

A strong conﬂict of cultures ensues between Elsa

and the Zverevs, her Russian hosts (indeed, Russo-European, in that
Zverev père is half-Dutch) – primitivism versus embourgeoisement – with
‘sorcery’ alleged on both sides. The one bewitched, however, is Yakko,
equally by his two ‘sister’ ﬁgures: the homely charms of the dark-haired
(relatively ‘southern’) Mar’ia Egorovna, daughter of the family, and the
untrammelled abandon of the blonde (northern) Elsa. Already with the
reputation of a ‘sorceress’ in Finland and capable of ‘out of body’ visions
of her homeland, Elsa revives the threads of sorcery through jealousy;
her ‘sister in the ﬁre’ tells her that she and Yakko are one, to be united
in ‘a single ﬂaming thread’.

Yakko’s dilemma seems resolved when Elsa

is rescued by a Finn during the great 1722 Petersburg ﬂood and taken
home to Finland.

He salves his conscience by delivering a purse of

money for Elsa’s presumed wedding; ‘the last thread is broken’, or so he
thinks: it is farewell to Suomi, Russia is now his ‘real fatherland’.

The

story of the Finnish girl and the rich Petersburg nobleman dissolves into
Finnish legend.

In Part I of The Salamander historical setting and European techno-

logical values take precedence over the purportedly folklorically based
fantastic.

In Part II the reverse is the case; as anticipated by the

Benvenuto Cellini epigraph,

primitive Finnish sorcery blends into

European alchemy, and the legend of the Finnish treasure (Sampo) with
the philosopher’s stone, to debase the enlightenment brought to Peter’s
Russia. Part I has an impersonal omniscient narration; Part II, in con-
trast, opens a century later in Moscow, with an introductory section
drawing philosophical lines of rationalism and mysticism between an
apparently authorial narrator and his Faust-like uncle (in the sense of

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Faust, protagonist of Odoevsky’s Russian Nights), a self-appointed adept
in matters occult. Following a haunted house (or bewitched boyar
mansion) visitation, the narrative, reverting to ‘the third decade of the
eighteenth century’, is indeed given over to the uncle (via his nephew’s
‘memory’).

Yakko’s fortunes have sharply deteriorated following the

death of Peter; ‘slandered and banished’ as a ‘poor parvenu’ and saddled
in Moscow with a nagging alcoholic wife Mar’ia, who condemns him
as ‘an accursed Finn, a sorcerer, a heretic’, he regrets his ‘little sister’ (ses-
tritsa) Elsa and is reduced to slaving over a hot alchemical stove in thrall
to a miserly Count.

Now Yakko himself sees and converses with a sala-

mander in the likeness of Elsa in the alchemical ﬁre, and the real Elsa
appears, seemingly oblivious to her other self. When the two Elsas fuse,
at least to Yakko’s perception, this heralds the demise of the vodka-
sodden Mar’ia – a victim of spontaneous combustion. Salamander-Elsa
guides Yakko to produce gold, whereupon – unwilling to divide the
spoils – Yakko takes over the body and identity of the old Count, with
the apparent assistance of Elsa’s long-dead grandfather, Rusi.

When

the Count-Yakko wants to dispatch Elsa back to Finland, in order to
contract a lecherous marriage to a teenage Russian princess, he is
metamorphosed (by Salamander-Elsa, in a reversal of Yakko’s earlier fra-
ternal wedding visitation) back into his former self and consumed in a
conﬂagration that fulﬁls the Salamander’s prophecy of Part I (and,
appropriately enough too, the anticipations of Odoevsky’s commentary-
foreword). The hauntings of the 1830s occur in a ‘new’ boyar palace
built on the site of the razed dwelling.

Otto Boele recognizes The Salamander as an ‘exceptionally rich story’,

but without following Odoevsky’s protagonist beyond his turn ‘into a
civilized and educated European’, while the main narrative viewpoint
utilized the voices of ‘a (Russiﬁed) Finnish boy and a Finnish girl’, intro-
duces complications deemed to lie beyond the scope of his Northern
theme per se.

From the perspective of the present chapter, however,

Odoevsky’s dilogy, when read against the texts summarized above,
clearly advances the Finnish imperial theme in nineteenth-century
Russian literature in the direction of what we might now acknowledge
as ‘Imperial Gothic’.

In respect of Baratynsky’s Eda, we can point to the respective repre-

sentations of the rugged Finnish landscape, the ersatz incest theme
suggested by invocations of the word sestritsa, Odoevsky’s idiosyncratic
bi-cultural play on the ﬁgure of the faithless lover, and his signiﬁcant
development (through cultural advancement and his own contacts
with the Grand Duchy) of Finnish mythology. Odoevsky’s depiction of

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a Finnish preference for Russian ‘protection’ over that of Sweden (the
Veineleisi rather than the Ruotsi) would appear even to have some his-
torical justiﬁcation for the 1700s; from the perspective of the imperial
actuality of the late 1830s, though, this may be more problematic.

The

dichotomies of Russia-Sweden and Russia-Finland (plus Russia-Europe),
however, serve only to introduce a lengthy series of dualities and cou-
plings in The Salamander: two countries and cultures (at various levels)
and the Romantic ‘two-world’ system (dvoemirie: found too in the meta-
physical attributes of Baratynsky’s poetics); two stories (the dilogy); and
doubled family and ‘sisterly’ situations.

However, it is from Pushkin’s works that particularly striking rever-

berations may be detected. Taking these in arguably ascending order of
importance, the ruthless acquisitiveness of the Yakko of Part II, leading
him to murder by desire (‘all is permitted to a rich man’), is reminis-
cent of Hermann’s determined rapacity in The Queen of Spades, while
the occult European alchemical level (and the chronological leap) par-
allels Pushkin’s Parisian anecdote of the Count Saint-Germain.

The

clearest echo of The Bronze Horseman is, of course, the motif of the ﬂood,
but Yakko personiﬁes ‘Nature’s [and Finland’s] sad foster-child’ –
Pushkin’s epithet of the epigraph to this essay. There is also a reﬂection
of the ‘cosmogonic struggle’ (in the ﬂood and within the hellﬁre of the
alchemical athanor) between the forces of cosmos and chaos discerned
in The Bronze Horseman by Svetlana Evdokimova, and of the ‘unorga-
nized chaos’ from which St Petersburg itself has emerged, as has the
‘wretched Finn’ (in Mar’ia’s denunciation of Yakko, the ‘accursed Finn’)
– but to which, though, like Pushkin’s ill-fated protagonist Evgenii, he
is destined to return.

Moving to comparison with Poltava, we can see (signiﬁcantly, this

time from a Finnish standpoint) another mythic depiction of ‘Peter’s
miraculous exploits’ and another version of the ‘inverted fairy tale’ con-
stituting ‘an integral part of the myth of the cosmic Russian empire’,
plus a similar ‘interweaving of the stories – a personal story and a
mythologized historical event’.

A parallel may also be drawn between

the Ukrainian Cossack girl (Maria), descending into derangement, and
her Finnish counterpart’s embracing of visionary sorcery, while the
mooted relationship between the old Count-Yakko and the young
princess echoes that between Mazeppa and his godchild Maria
(Kochubei’s daughter) – a reversal too of the purported ‘affair’ between
Hermann and the octogenarian Countess.

However, we return to The Blackamoor of Peter the Great as a principal

prototext. Odoevsky, one of the editors of the ‘thick’ journal the

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Contemporary (Sovremennik) in the period immediately following
Pushkin’s death, would have enjoyed close familiarity with the manu-
script of this work.

According to the German biography of Abram

Hannibal, Pushkin’s main source, Peter ‘wished to make examples’ that
would ‘put [Russians] to shame . . . even from among wild men – such
as Negroes’.

So why should not Odoevsky’s ‘half wild Finn’ be ‘grad-

ually transformed into an educated European’?

Ibrahim matures in

Paris and Yakko in Holland, an alternative Petrine fount of Western
progress. Yakko had also been in Paris, while, another German source
afﬁrms, Hannibal may even have been ‘a homeless little Mohr (Negro),
acquired in Holland by Peter I to serve as a ship’s boy’.

In addition to

parallels in European education, Ibrahim and Yakko both achieve
betrothal into Russian families after attending court Assemblies. Almost
identical too are their respective visions of Petrine Russia as ‘workshop’
and ‘machine’.

While it is uncertain how Pushkin would have con-

tinued his ancestral romance, the historical Hannibal too fell upon
leaner times after the emperor’s death, being ‘vaguely accused of politi-
cal intrigue’; while ‘Pushkin’s presentation of Abram’s Siberian period
is false’, and Petr Petrovich Petrov (‘alias Abram Gannibal’) certainly
avoided anything resembling Yakko’s fate, the reality – according to
Nabokov at least – was far removed from the ‘independent brilliant per-
sonality’ wishfully envisaged by his descendant.

Part II of The Salamander may suggest the ‘revenge’ of the multi-

metamorphosed Ivan Ivanovich Yakko, both for the loss of his glitter-
ing Petrine career and for the ultimate failure of his apprenticeship in
cultural assimilation; but the ultimate retribution is of course wreaked
by the eponymous (of Part II) Elsa.

In St Petersburg ‘the subject of

mockery and hatred’, this ‘poor child of nature’ strikes back in Moscow
– at Russian society and at her faithless sibling-lover – on behalf not
only of the empire, but of her female sex, that perpetually colonized
half of humanity.

In this instance, it is with a particular vengeance

that, in Azim’s terms, ‘the inner secret enemy, the Romantic self of the
Gothic heroine, cannot be completely extricated, and constantly pushes
against the textual surface to disrupt and interrupt the narrative of
her growth’.

Odoevsky’s twist on what Sakharov sees as ‘the symbolic

depiction of machine-Russia’ is thus a highly Gothicized one, open to
postcolonial and feminist readings.

Ewa Thompson alleges an absence in Russia of ‘that healthy dis-ease

with which the once-presumptive cultures began to look at themselves’,
while, according to Edward Said, ‘representation itself has been charac-
terized as keeping the subordinate subordinate, the inferior inferior’.

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Whereas Prince Odoevsky, himself the last of a line descended from (the
Nordic-Varangian) Rurik and subsequently Russia’s ‘premier nobleman’,
could never be described as a radical ﬁrebrand, he was capable, along
with certain literary contemporaries (earlier: Ryleev, Viazemsky and
perhaps Baratynsky) of at least selected moments of dis-ease as the
Russian Empire careered on its post-Decembrist course towards military
reverses in the Crimea and a grotesquely overdue introduction of
reforms.

Notes

1. Mednyi vsadnik (1833); quoted here from Otto Boele, The North in Russian

Romantic Literature (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 1996), p. 219.
Among several available full translations are those by Walter Arndt, in
Alexander Pushkin, Collected Narrative and Lyric Poetry, trans. Walter Arndt
(Ann Arbor: Ardis 1983), Catharine Nepomnyashchy in Christine Rydel, ed.,
The Ardis Anthology of Russian Romanticism (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), and
A.D.P. Briggs in idem, ed., Alexander Pushkin, (‘Everyman’s Poetry’), (London:
Everyman, 1997).

2. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage Books, 1994),

p. 9; Ewa M. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonial-
ism (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000), p. 1.

3. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: an Interpretive History of Russian

Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 208.

4. G.O. Vinokur, The Russian Language: a Brief History, trans. Mary A. Forsyth,

ed. James Forsyth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 111.

5. Martin Malia, Russia Under Western Eyes: From The Bronze Horseman to the

Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2000), pp. 38, 144. For a comment on the ‘cultural imperialist’ reaction
to this phenomenon, see Boele, The North in Russian Romantic Literature,
pp. 54–6 and 83, n. 4.

6. Malia, Russia Under Western Eyes, p. 98.
7. Fred Singleton, A Short History of Finland, rev. A.F. Upton (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 36–7.

8. Ibid., p. 16.
9. Ibid., p. 42.

10. Boele, The North in Russian Romantic Literature, pp. 19, 215; Singleton, A Short

History of Finland, p. 46.

11. Singleton, A Short History of Finland, p. 46.
12. Ibid., p. 73.
13. Boele, The North in Russian Romantic Literature, pp. 19, 21.
14. Ibid., pp. 21–2.
15. Ibid., p. 22.
16. See in particular Boele’s Chapter 7, ‘The “other” North’, ibid., pp. 213–48.
17. Ibid, pp. 246, n. 1, 214.
18. Ibid., p. 9.
19. Ibid., pp. 218, 221.

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20. Firdous Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel (London: Routledge 1993), p. 27.
21. This work was published in full only in 1939: for text, see A.S. Nemzer,

and A.M. Peskov, eds, Russkaia romanticheskaia poema (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
‘Pravda’, 1985), pp. 315–60.

22. I am indebted for insights into Baratynsky and Finland to Michael Basker’s

paper, ‘Russian Poets on Finnish Impressions’, given to the BASEES
Nineteenth-Century Studies Group at Bristol (July 2000) and to contribu-
tions to the ensuing discussion from Robin Milner-Gulland.

23. E.A. Baratynsky, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. V.M. Sergeev, intro. I.M.

Toibin, ‘Biblioteka poeta’, large series, 3rd edn (Leningrad: Sovestskii pisatel’,
1989), pp. 72–3.

24. E.A. Baratynsky, Eda, trans. Christine Rydel, in Rydel ed., The Ardis Anthol-

ogy of Russian Romanticism, pp. 124–30; Baratynsky, Eda, in Baratynsky,
Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, pp. 229–44.

25. Luc J. Beaudoin, Resetting the Margins: Russian Romantic Verse Tales and the

Idealized Woman (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 214. The hussar was
originally named Vladimir, had a Byronic curl and was termed ‘villain’
(zlodei) and ‘unclean spirit’ (dukh nechistyi): see variants (Baratynsky, Polnoe
sobranie stikhotvorenii, pp. 359–68).

26. Geir Kjetsaa, [Geir Khetso], Evgenii Baratynskii: Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo (Oslo:

Universitetsforlaget, 1973), pp. 356–68.

27. See Beaudoin, Resetting the Margins.
28. Brieﬂy considered by Kjetsaa, Evgenii Baratynskii, pp. 364–6; Boele, The North

in Russian Romantic Literature, pp. 227–8.

29. Baratynsky, Eda, in Rydel, ed., The Ardis Anthology of Russian Romanticism,

p. 128.

30. Ibid., p. 129.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., p. 124.
33. Beaudoin, Resetting the Margins, pp. 76–7.
34. The epilogue, omitted from Rydel’s translation of Eda, written in 1824 and

rejected by the censorship, was ﬁrst published only in 1860 (Baratynsky,
Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, p. 432). Although it appears in the text of most
modern editions (e.g. Nemzer and Peskov, Russkaia romanticheskaia poema,
pp. 243–4), Sergeev’s ‘Poet’s Library’ edition of 1989 conﬁnes it to the ‘Other
editions and variants’ section of the apparatus (Baratynsky, Polnoe sobranie
stikhotvorenii, pp. 367–8).

35. The epilogue to this poem is, for some reason, omitted in the only available

English translation, (under the title ‘The Captive in the Caucasus’) in the
volume Alexander Pushkin by A.D.P. Briggs; however an excellent idea of its
ﬂavour is furnished by the extended quotation given in Susan Layton,
Russian Literature and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
p. 101.

36. The term is suggested in Harsha Ram’s essay ‘Russian Poetry and the Impe-

rial Sublime’ in Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally, eds, Russian
Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age (Evanston, Illinois:
Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 21–49; see ibid., p. 48; and Layton,
Russian Literature and Empire, p. 107. Ewa Thompson goes further in this
direction: ‘Of all the great Russian writers, Pushkin was probably the crudest
jingoist’ (Thompson, Imperial Knowledge, p. 67).

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37. On Baratynsky’s nevertheless close relations with Davydov, see Kjetsaa,

Evgenii Baratynskii, pp. 100–1, 113, 117.

38. Svetlana Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1999), p. 173.

39. Alexander Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh

(Moscow:

Khudozhestvennaia literatura., 1975), vol. 3, pp. 170–213; Pushkin, Collected
Narrative and Lyric Poetry, pp. 324–69.

40. Ivan Mazeppa (1639–1709) spelt his name with a double ‘p’ in the Latin

alphabet, but with a single ‘p’ in both Ukrainian and Russian. Debreczeny
sees Poltava as a less unambiguously imperialist work than surface readings
suggest, in that the narrative-authorial voice of ‘the poet laureate of the
imperial court’ (i.e. Pushkin) is only one voice among several: Paul
Debreczeny, Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian
Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 123–40. Pauls
approaches the work from a Ukrainian perspective and stresses Pushkin’s his-
torical distortions: see John P. Pauls, Pushkin’s ‘Poltava’ (New York:
Shevchenko Scientiﬁc Society, 1962). The most sophisticated reading,
though, is that provided by Evdokimova: see Evdokimova, Pushkin’s His-
torical Imagination, pp. 173–208.

41. Nemzer and Peskov, eds, Russkaia romanticheskaia poema, pp. 113–50.
42. Ibid., pp. 548–50.
43. The popularity of this Romantic theme is stressed by Roman Stal-Stocki: ‘The

most prominent poets, artists and composers, such as Byron, Hugo, Ryleyev,
Pushkin, Shevchenko, Slowacki, Frich, Boulanger, Liszt, Tschaikovsky, Payne,
Gottschal, Lepky and Staryts’ka created notable works centred around
Mazeppa’ (‘Preface’ to Pauls, Pushkin’s ‘Poltava’, p. vii).

44. Bulgarin’s Mazepa is thus described by Mark Al’tshuller, in his Epokha Val’tera

Skotta v Rossii: Istoricheskii roman 1830-kh godov (St Petersburg: Akademich-
eskii Proekt, 1996), pp. 126–31. On Karamzin’s story, see Derek Offord,
‘Karamzin’s Gothic Tale: the Island of Bornholm’ in Neil Cornwell, ed., The
Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (Amsterdam and
Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 37–58.

45. Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel, p. 185.
46. Originally published in Sovremennik 6 (1837). See Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii

v desiati tomakh, vol. 5, pp. 7–37; Pushkin, Complete Prose Fiction, trans. Paul
Debreczeny (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), pp. 11–40; and, (as
‘Peter the Great’s Blackamoor’), Pushkin, The Queen of Spades and Other
Stories, trans. Alan Myers, ed. and intro. Andrew Kahn (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997), pp. 209–45. On the Russian word arap and the choice
of the word ‘blackamoor’ by translators, see Andrew Kahn’s note: The Queen
of Spades, p. 265. For an enlightening analysis of what she considers
‘a Romantic fragment’, see Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination,
pp. 139–72 (255n2).

47. In a fascinating piece of research, published as an appendix to his volumi-

nous edition of Evgenii Onegin, Vladimir Nabokov investigates sources for
the origins and career of Pushkin’s ancestor, ‘Petr Petrovich Petrov’, or
Avraam Petrov, alias Annibal (Hannibal, or in Russian ‘Gannibal’),
1693?–1781: Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Abram Gannibal’, in Eugene Onegin: a Novel
in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, trans. Vladimir Nabokov with a commentary,

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4 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), vol. 3, pp. 387–447.
Ibrahim (Russian ‘Ibragim’) is the Turkish form of Abraham (Avram, or
‘Abram’): ibid., p. 394. Any idea of direct descent from the Carthaginian
Hannibal (ibid., p. 397) is implausible (ibid., p. 432).

48. Pushkin, The Queen of Spades, pp. 220, 209.
49. Vladimir Odoevsky, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed. V.I. Sakharov (Moscow:

Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 1, 141–219; Vladimir
Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, trans. Neil Cornwell
(London: Bristol Classical Press and Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern
University Press, 1992), pp. 133–212.

50. V.I. Sakharov, ‘Eshche o Pushkine i V.F. Odoevskom’, Pushkin: Issledovaniia i

materialy, IX (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979), pp. 224–30, at p. 227.

51. On Odoevsky and Pushkin, their literary and personal relations, see

Sakharov, ‘Eshche o Pushkine i V.F. Odoevskom’, and Neil Cornwell, The Life,
Times and Milieu of V.F. Odoyevsky 1804–1869 (London: Athlone Press and
Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 241–8.

52. See Cornwell, The Life, Times and Milieu of V.F. Odoyevsky and Vladimir

Odoevsky and Romantic Poetics (Providence, RI and Oxford: Berghahn Books,
1998).

53. In her essay on ‘the crisis of engendering in The Salamander’, Cynthia Ramsey

points out that, on the death of the ‘father’ (Peter the Great), Yakko decamps
to ‘mother’ Moscow (see: Ramsey, ‘Gothic Treatment of the Crisis of Engen-
dering in Odoevskii’s The Salamander’, in Neil Cornwell, ed., The Gothic-
Fantastic, pp. 145–69, at p. 166).

54. See Odoevsky, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2, p. 353.
55. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 133.
56. Ibid., p. 147. The elimination of previous Finnish settlements on the site of

St Petersburg had become standard practice in Russian writings. On the foun-
dation of the city, see Michael Basker’s note ‘The Petersburg Background’, in
A.S. Pushkin, Mednyi vsadnik / The Bronze Horseman, ed. Michael Basker
(London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000), pp. xxxv–xliv.

57. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, pp. 137–40.
58. See Odoevsky’s note or ‘commentary’ (Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2,

pp. 141–2), presented in The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales as an ‘Author’s
Foreword’ (pp. 133–4); indeed, Elsa sings passages now collected in the
recently published The Kalevala (ibid., pp. 168–72). On Grot’s publications
on Finland of 1839 and 1840, see M.A. Tur’ian, ‘Evoliutsiia romanticheskikh
motivov v povesti V.F. Odoevskogo “Salamandra” ’, in Russkii romantizm, ed.
K.N. Grigor’ian (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), pp. 187–206 at p. 190n. In 1846
Odoevsky bought himself a small estate in Finland, where he attempted in
vain to ‘break the strings’ tying him to St Petersburg (Cornwell, The Life,
Times and Milieu of V.F. Odoyevsky, p. 18).

59. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 142.
60. Ibid., pp. 148, 149.
61. Cf. Abram Gannibal, once known as ‘Petr Petrovich Petrov’ (Nabokov,

‘Abram Gannibal’, p. 432); Yakko, rather than being accorded (the pseudo-
paternal) Peter’s names, takes the archetypal Russian name and patronymic.
Ramsey (‘Gothic Treatment of the Crisis of Engendering in Odoevskii’s The
Salamander’, p. 163) sees the central theme of the dilogy as ‘the problematic

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nature of a national identity based on the law of the father’ (pointing also
to the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini epigraph to ‘Elsa’: see below).

62. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 152.
63. Ibid., pp. 153, 167. Now called ‘Lizaveta Ivanovna’, Elsa’s shared patronymic

‘indicates a future conﬂict of sexual desire’ between herself and Yakko
(Ramsey, ‘Gothic Treatment of the Crisis of Engendering in Odoevskii’s The
Salamander’, p. 160).

64. According to Nabokov (‘Abram Gannibal’, p. 423), September 1706 saw ‘the

ﬁrst inundation in “Piterburh” (or “Paradis”, as [Peter] fondly called the town
he had just founded’).

65. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 176.
66. Elsa does not, however, embark on amorous intrigue with Zverev ﬁls

(who has now vanished from the plot); ‘the dangers evoked by the savage
colonial Other’, combined with those of ‘a transgressive sexuality’ (Azim,
The Colonial Rise of the Novel, p. 186) are here directed only at Elsa’s partly
assimilated ‘sibling’.

67. As mentioned above, there is a blur between fantastic elements derived from

European and Finnish traditions; moreover, for all the supposedly Finnish
basis (Odoevsky’s ‘commentary’), it has been afﬁrmed that salamanders are
a quantity unknown in Finnish folklore (Tur’ian, ‘Evoliutsiia romantich-
eskikh motivov v povesti V.F. Odoevskogo “Salamandra” ’, p. 189).

68. ‘We were sitting in front of the ﬁre; suddenly father hit me so hard that

I cried. “Don’t cry”, said father, “you’ve done nothing wrong”; at that
moment the Salamander appeared in the ﬁre; “I hit you so you don’t forget
it and so you’ll pass this event on to your children” ’ (Odoevsky, The
Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 177).

69. Ibid., p. 187.
70. Ibid., pp. 189, 190.
71. Such ‘body-switching’ (‘body-hopping’, or ‘spirit travelling’) has become

a relatively common feature of modern Gothic: see for instance Paul
Wendkos’s ﬁlm The Mephisto Waltz (1971), Anne Rice’s The Tale of the Body
Thief (1992), David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999), and recent episodes of the
television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Odoevsky’s use seemingly
represents an early example of the phenomenon.

72. Boele, The North in Russian Romantic Literature, pp. 231–2; 246n3.
73. ‘Imperial Gothic’ is a term used by Patrick Brantlinger in his Rule of Dark-

ness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1988).

74. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 136. Ramsey (‘Gothic

Treatment of the Crisis of Engendering in Odoevskii’s The Salamander’,
p. 157) attaches signiﬁcance to the author-narrator’s ‘embedding the old
name for Russia (Rus’) into Rusi’s name’.

75. The possible listing of dualities seems almost endless: foreign-native, St

Petersburg-Moscow, the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, the 1820s–40s
(or mysticism versus rationalism), alchemy-folklore, history-legend, the
historical and Gothic genres.

76. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 190. Yakko had displayed

psychopathic tendencies as a boy in his violent ‘hatred for the Swedes’ (ibid.,
p. 145). He had himself seen evidence of European alchemical achievement

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in Paris and Vienna (ibid., pp. 191–2). Odoevsky depicts Saint-Germain as
an occult mage in his own ‘Letter IV [to Countess Ye. P. Rostopchina]’ of
1839 (ibid., pp. 60–5).

77. Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination, pp. 217, 229. According to

Evdokimova’s reading, Evgenii ‘fails [his] initiation’, as ‘a man who places
himself outside the history of his family and his land is doomed to ruin’
(ibid., p. 231); Odoevsky’s Yakko contrives to do this with both his families
and lands.

78. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 148; Evdokimova,

Pushkin’s Historical Imagination, pp. 198, 207.

79. Sakharov, ‘Eshche o Pushkine i V.F. Odoevskom’, pp. 225–6.
80. Nabokov, ‘Abram Gannibal’, p. 420.
81. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 147.
82. Nabokov, ‘Abram Gannibal’, p. 436.
83. Sakharov, ‘Eshche o Pushkine i V.F. Odoevskom’, p. 228.
84. Nabokov, ‘Abram Gannibal’, pp. 433–4, 438.
85. Tur’ian, ‘Evoliutsiia romanticheskikh motivov v povesti V.F. Odoevskogo

“Salamandra” ’, p. 193.

86. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, pp. 176, 168.
87. Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel, p. 104.
88. Sakharov, ‘Eshche o Pushkine i V.F. Odoevskom’, p. 230.
89. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge, p. 28; Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 95.

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A Singular Invasion: Revisiting
the Postcoloniality of Bram
Stoker’s Dracula

William Hughes

Over the past decade Gothic criticism has arguably proved as respon-
sive to innovation in the theory of colonial and postcolonial ﬁctions as
it was to developments in literary psychoanalysis some forty years
earlier. The rise of a postcolonial discourse within the ﬁeld, though, in
a sense makes problematic the boundaries and deﬁnitions which demar-
cate what it is to be textually, discursively Gothic, and also highlights
the temporal considerations which fracture as well as unify the integr-
ity of the genre. For critics applying psychoanalysis to the Gothic in
the 1960s, the situation was relatively uncomplicated: for Maurice
Richardson, writing in 1959 for example, the psychoanalysable Gothic
was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, not Richard Matheson’s
equally vampiric novel I Am Legend, published ﬁve years earlier in 1954.

Dracula, a non-contemporary artefact, essentially encodes a pattern of
neurosis and repression which, because of its labyrinthine oppressive-
ness and sheer difference, functions in its own right as an effectively
Gothic signiﬁer, an intrusion of the repressive, guilty past into the
enlightened, all-seeing present. In a sense, therefore, in this ‘enlight-
ened’, self-conscious age, there should be no perception of a ‘Gothic’
present, no repressed self breaking through in a troublesome, rebellious
literature – or, at least, no texts of this nature that ought to be recog-
nized as being worthy of criticism.

For the Gothic critic writing at the opening of the twenty-ﬁrst century,

however, the situation is considerably more complex. Immediately, the
simplistic temporality which stratiﬁes the genre into a deﬁnitive ﬁrst
wave bounded loosely by Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley, a half-
hearted, sensationalist revival under Collins and Le Fanu and a ﬁnal,
decadent collapse under Stoker, Wilde and Machen, becomes disrupted
by the acknowledgement of a continuing Gothic tradition, at least in

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Britain, across the Edwardian period, and a ﬂourishing – and often sub-
cultural – heritage through the mid- to late-twentieth century.

This

expanded temporality, which implicates the present, is intimately con-
nected with the rise of a postcolonial consciousness among Gothic
critics, and an acknowledgement of the Gothic as both a genre and a
discursive practice among those who work with literatures arising from,
or depicting, colonized or formerly colonized nations.

That contemporary literatures could be both Gothic and the product

of postcolonial cultures should come as no surprise. ‘We live in Gothic
times’, as Angela Carter astutely observed in the ‘Afterword’ to Fireworks
(1974), and in a world where dispossession, invasion and apocalypse are
contemporary cultural motifs whose puissance has long outlived the
simplistic binary of a neo-imperialist, capitalist West and a crypto-
imperialist communist East. The Gothic, in such readings, continues to
rehearse the collapse of a stable world, the destruction or disruption
of countries, regions and cities recognizably local to some, though
markedly exotic to other readers located but a nation’s length away. The
same might equally be said, arguably, with regard to the genre’s
continued interaction with the integrity of sexual boundaries or the
absolute truths which uphold the exclusivity of religious sectarianism.
The human body, with its quantum of pain and abjection, ought pos-
sibly to be seen as the last – if not the most appropriate postmodernist
– Gothic territory, but Fred Botting’s notion of a subcutaneous horror
which circulates ‘with a supplementary contamination of borders and
a pervasive and free-ﬂoating anxiety’ might be equally be applied to a
more conventionally geographical terrain.

As Botting argues, horror is neither what it used to be nor, indeed,

‘where it used to be’.

In a world of shifting signiﬁcation, where ‘[t]errors

of the night are replaced by terrors of the light’, the discourse of Gothic
adds meaning, attempts to ﬁx again the chiaroscuro of acceptable and
unacceptable, to locate the reader in a familiar terrain of fear and
outrage.

Gothic has to be the face of the postcolonial because the

culture of Gothic – grandiose, oppressive, deviant and yet awesome in
the power of its presence – is somehow not merely the face of the past,
but of the imperialist past also. Equally, it might be added, Gothic
inﬂects the relationship of the past to the present, marking a continu-
ity even as other discursive interests attempt to force a hiatus between
then and now. Superﬁcially, Gothic – to be Gothicized, even – liberates
that past, allows it to again be present in all its oppression and arbitrary
injustice. Yet, arguably, the imposition of Gothic, its preoccupations and
implications, limits what we can say about either past or present. The

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same criticism, needless to say, might be levelled at the theoretical and
cultural determinations which may be imposed through the discourses
of the postcolonial.

Postcolonial readings of the Gothic are thus, in a sense, readings of

the past – whether that past be located in a text literally from that past,
or implicated upon that past – through the ﬁlter of a conscious, and
occasionally apologetic, present. Such readings may equally imply the
imposition of a symbolism not readily available to a previous audience,
where Mary Shelley’s nameless Creature may become not merely an
abstracted Rousseauan Noble Savage but equally an accessible Caliban,
the latter with its misspelt, anagrammatical double, cannibal, a victim
to be pitied by the postcolonial world, a threat to be feared by those
forbears implicated in Empire. The relationship between God and
Adam, explicit in Frankenstein, may thus be overwritten, its implication
of creation over and above colonization dispersed.

To borrow a valu-

able concept from Foucault, therefore, the postcolonial, postcolonial-
ized Gothic might be said to perform a service, a function in the present,
translated or mediated as it is through the discourses of criticism. Such
ﬁctions afﬁrm a Gothic past and preﬁgure a Gothic present – but allow
the perceiving or criticizing self that edge of distance which separates
the self from those ‘other Victorians’ – here rendered as ‘other imperi-
alists’ – of the present, as much as those of the past.

A complex pro-

gramme of inscription and evasion is thus engendered, one which in
effect represents the colonization or hollowing-out of genre and of his-
toricity, and its exploitation for the ideological or discursive purposes
of the (transient) present.

Postcolonialism forces the critical reader to read Dracula in a certain

way, much, indeed, as recent developments in the same theoretical ﬁeld
have transformed the approach to Wuthering Heights. In the case of
Brontë’s novel, merely geographical Romanticism and the provincial
exotic have been superseded by a powerful indictment of the British
slave trade in Africa and the Americas, and indeed of repressive slaver-
ies closer to home.

Heathcliff, no longer simply the Byronic or Gothic

isolato enmeshed in his own guilt and mystery, becomes instead a synec-
dochal ‘tragic hero of the age of emancipation and reform’.

In such

accounts, though, if Heathcliff be ‘a modern Hamlet [who] dies as a
martyr and hero of social change’, he paradoxically lacks the individu-
ality of that emblematic character – as if Hamlet, as in some psycho-
analytical readings, might come to stand for the psychoses of all
humanity.

Count Dracula, who may equally emblematize the isolato

of Gothic and Byronic antecedent – Manfred, Montoni, Schedoni, and

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Melmoth are all generic ancestors for Stoker’s Count – comes equally to
stand in synecdochal relationship to the legions which he threatens –
implicitly but never explicitly – to import to the shores of England.

Count Dracula, of course, provides a tempting ﬁgure around which

the motif of invasion might be developed. Like George Du Maurier’s
Svengali, as Nina Auerbach notes, he comes out of ‘the mysterious East!
The poisonous East’, though this East is not so much the location of
‘Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies’, as Edward Said would
have it, but the locus of an immigration problem unwelcome and dis-
tasteful to many Britons, whether it be in the context of late-Victorian
Russian pogroms or more recent upheavals in the Balkans.

For Jules

Zanger, therefore, Count Dracula speciﬁcally vocalizes the ‘hostile
perceptions’ of a British public responding to a subtle ‘invasion’ of
displaced European Jewry, by vilifying the victims of Eastern pogroms
in ‘a socially acceptable manner’.

As H.L. Malchow, acknowledging

the inﬂuence of Patrick Brantlinger, suggests, in such readings, ‘Imper-
ial Gothic is to a large extent racial Gothic’ – a Gothic of competitive
races, and ﬂuctuating ascendancies.

But Count Dracula is not Jewish,

and the one Jew in the novel, implicated as he is within Stoker’s char-
acteristic anti-semitism, is clearly delineated as such, set aside as sepa-
rate from his occasional employer, the Boyar Count who respects the
sacred emblems of the West’s Christianity.

For the majority of critics, though, this racial Other remains tantaliz-

ingly undeﬁned, a racially and geographically vague oppositional force
threatening ‘to penetrate “the heart of the Empire” ’.

It must be said,

however, that this critically appropriated East is not the geographical ter-
ritory explicitly rendered in Stoker’s novel, but rather a ﬁction based on
an effective suspension of belief in the novel’s earliest stated locality,
Transylvania. Clearly Transylvania, though a territory both exotic
and colonized in the past by the eastern powers of the Ottoman and
Habsburg empires, cannot represent a sphere of conventional British
interest akin to an India, a China or an Africa, those locations of impe-
rial Gothic returns in Kipling, Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle. It is,
quite simply, outside the political sphere of British national or imperial
presence, a component not of formal or informal Empire but of geo-
graphical generalization – here the hinterland of the Balkans – the impo-
sition of which marks areas of sporadic interest outside of formal
national control or interest best denoted as areas of policy rather than
of politics.

Nor again can Harker’s timid, monolingual incursion into

that country as a secondary businessman – an employee ﬁrst of Hawkins
and then of Dracula – be regarded as an invasive act sufﬁcient to

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motivate an aggressive return to the heart of Empire. Harker travels to
serve and to obey, rather than to conquer, and his urbane, Continental
employer is no savage tribesman, no ignorant peasant.

Indeed, as

Boyar he lives in discrete isolation, in a feudal world which may reﬂect
the archaic West as much as negative perceptions of the contemporary
Ottoman East. In short, though, Harker is no colonist, Count Dracula
no subaltern subject ready for exploitation, and Transylvania, partaking
as it does of both the Germanic-sounding ‘Mittel Land’ (p. 7) and the
polyglot, multi-racial Carpathians (pp. 6, 2), is no Orient in the con-
ventional imperial sense.

This confusion between the named and the non-speciﬁc, between an

identiﬁable Transylvania and a generalized East, effectively challenges
the assertions of critics as diverse as Jules Zanger, Patrick Brantlinger and
Christopher Frayling, wherein the novel is read as an allegory of colo-
nization. Such readings enforce an appropriation whereby the speciﬁc
location – Transylvania – becomes in effect meaningless within the post-
colonial discourse, its status only as an Other place, an inland Illyria.

At most it – ‘the East in the person of the Count’, as Cannon Schmitt
depicts the invasive personality – represents an East far less deﬁned than
that of Said, an East which, for all this non-speciﬁcity, still ‘tries to get
its own back on the West’ for crimes which remain both unnumbered
and unspeciﬁed.

It would appear, therefore, that the invasion script

of Dracula is most effective when read not as an incident- or racial-
group-speciﬁc incursion, but as an abstracted conﬂict of Orient against
Occident – a conﬂict which may unite the representatives of the West
against any challenge to the latter’s cultural integrity or hegemony.

It is this facet of conﬂict, this drive whereby the beleaguered West per-

ceptibly gains both unity and a sense of purpose in the face of the
Count’s incursion, that facilitates the continued re-scripting of the
vampire as, in Stephen Arata’s words, ‘the representative or embodiment
of a race’ or even as an individual who may ‘stand in for an entire race’.

The implication of Arata’s work, and indeed, of that of many other
critics, is that Count Dracula can never be regarded as an individual,
but only as a race-synecdoche whose symbolic qualities arguably exist
emphatically in interpretative opposition to a pluralized unity. In effect,
the vampire has to return home to the West, and has to colonize that
centre-imperial terrain, because the West, personiﬁed here as a (twenti-
eth-century) critical idiom, has anachronistically created him in order
to preserve its own identity – or to express a perception of its own post-
colonial guilt. This Count Dracula, it must be said, is the vampire of
literary criticism, and not necessarily that of Stoker’s novel, and his

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invasion, as interpreted, is arguably a projection of twentieth- and
twenty-ﬁrst-century unease rather than an unequivocal signiﬁer of
nineteenth-century crisis. It remains impossible for the reader to ignore
the invasion script, for it is an explicit script, whose presence is con-
veyed in Harker’s awareness of the implications of the Count’s move
westward (p. 51). But it is possible to resist the critical drive which trans-
forms both that invasion and its singular invader into an event within
the logical force of postcolonial discourse through close reference to the
novel as a nineteenth-century ﬁction, and to the manner in which the
Count is made to participate in a colonial, rather than postcolonial, dis-
cursive mythology. This colonial mythology, it must be added, is seem-
ingly oblique though frequently acknowledged in the perception of the
Count’s character and aspirations.

Fox-hunting, according to one late-nineteenth-century source, is ‘a

thoroughly English sport, pursued by the middle and upper classes with
courage and ardour.’

Signiﬁcantly, it is one of the distinctive social

practices exported to colonial outposts by the British – functioning there
as both a reminder of the home country and a reinforcement of its social
exclusions – as well as one of the sports whose trappings are most fre-
quently – and unsuccessfully – emulated by parvenus and foreigners as
diverse as R. S Surtees’ cockney grocer, Jorrocks, and Wilkie Collins’s
Italian exile, Professor Pesca.

Count Dracula, for all his explicit desire

to be unnoticeable and ‘like the rest’ (p. 20) of his social equals in
England does not emulate the British by donning hunting pink, though
no doubt he would be fully cognisant with the conventions of riding
to hounds through his perusal of the ‘vast number [of ] English books .
. . and bound volumes of magazines and newspapers’ which treat of
‘England and English life and customs and manners’ (p. 19) contained
in his castle.

The Count, however, is subject to the sporting discourses

which support the social and nationalistic practice of hunting – though,
it must be acknowledged, he is scripted here as the prey rather than one
who joins in the chase. Van Helsing makes this much clear when out-
lining his plan of campaign to the group assembled at Seward’s asylum.
Referring to Count Dracula’s house at Piccadilly, the Professor deter-
mines: ‘We shall go there and search that house; and when we learn
what it holds, then we do what our friend Arthur call, in his phrases of
hunt, “stop the earth,” and so we run down our old fox – so? is it not?’
(p. 292). In hunting terminology, a fox’s ‘earth’ or burrow is ‘stopped’
in order to keep the animal above ground for the hunt.

Indeed, these

‘phrases of hunt’ are again recalled, as when Van Helsing notes that ‘He,
our enemy, have gone away’ (p. 315) – an allusion to the horn call given

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when the fox breaks cover – and where he suggests that the pursuit
resembles ‘a pack of men following like dogs after a fox’ (p. 315).

Else-

where, Van Helsing opens the group’s ﬁnal campaign of pursuit with
the exclamation ‘Tally ho! as friend Arthur would say when he put on
his red frock!’ (pp. 313–14).

This unacknowledged context at ﬁrst sight disrupts the established

colonial reading of the Count’s invasion and retreat, though the signi-
ﬁer of the fox – and, consequentially, that of fox-hunting – is over-
determined. Much may be made, for example, of the fox’s reputation
(possibly undeserved though admittedly ‘proverbial’) for ‘cunning and
intelligence’, so often applauded by the hunter – as indeed the Count’s
endeavours are admired by Van Helsing (p. 321).

Certainly, for Van

Helsing, ‘Our old fox is wily; oh, so wily, and we must follow with wile’
(p. 314). The fox, like the Count, has ‘pointed’ ears and exudes a ‘pecu-
liar scent or odour’, attributes which have in the past been associated
with the latter’s otherness or, indeed, foreignness.

Both vampire and

fox are largely nocturnal, each repairing to its respective ‘earth-home’
(p. 240) when the evening’s predation draws to a close.

The fox, again,

though verminous and at times associated with the spread of rabies
as well as the destruction of livestock, remains primarily a domestic –
and indeed, territorial – animal rather than an invasive threat.

It ap-

pears that only the abiding image of a group of hunters united in
pursuit of a singular prey unites this most domestic and English read-
ing of the Count’s bestial nature with that of critics inﬂuenced by
postcolonial theory.

Little, paradoxically, might be extracted from the other, more exotic,

beast associated with the Count – the tiger. The Count, having infected
Mina Harker, retreats from Britain and from the group which has suc-
cessfully ‘stopped his earths’ by sanctifying his scattered cofﬁns. Mina
Harker questions the Professor, effectively diverting the bestial associa-
tions of the Count from one predator to another: ‘But will not the
Count take his rebuff wisely? Since he has been driven from England,
will he not avoid it, as the tiger does the village from which he has been
hunted?’ (p. 320). England is the village, it would seem, but the enemy
remains a lone predator – ‘the tiger’ – faced by a community. He is cer-
tainly no invading army, strong in its numbers. Notably, Van Helsing
enthusiastically embraces the possibilities presented by the image:

‘Aha!’ he said, ‘your simile of the tiger good, for me, and I shall adopt
him. Your man-eater, as they of India call the tiger who has once
taste blood of the human, care no more for other prey, but prowl

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unceasing till he get him. This that we hunt from our village is a
tiger, too, a man-eater, and he never cease to prowl. Nay, in himself,
he is not one to retire and stay afar. In his life, his living life, he go
over the Turkey frontier and attack his enemy on his own ground;
he be beaten back, but did he stay? No? He come again, and again,
and again.’

(p. 320)

Van Helsing neglects to make the one statement which links the tiger
with the fox, and indeed, which effectively associates both animals with
the predator-Count. The tiger and the fox, literally as well as reputedly,
are solitary hunters, individual predators: Kipling’s Shere Kahn, from his
The Jungle Book of 1893, for example, hunts alone, and is defeated by a
bovine and vulpine collective led by the boy, Mowgli. The deﬁning
image here is not bestiality, nor an exoticism which may be translated
into foreignness, nor indeed a simple motif of invasion: it is, rather, the
perception of a solitary, individualistic and often ingenious predator
who holds the potential to defeat the forces of collectivity.

This aspect of the Count’s invasive propensity has been acknowledged

before, though never in relation to how such activities are rendered
through the mythologies of colonial discourse. Robert A. Smart, for
example, reads the vampire as a representative of monopoly capital, the
revenant’s defeat being assured only by the ‘combined enterprise of a
young band of entrepreneurs’.

Smart’s debt to the inﬂuential work of

Franco Moretti is here acknowledged by his extended quotation from
the latter’s Signs Taken for Wonders, which conﬁgures the Count as ‘a
true monopolist’ who ‘will not brook competition’.

In Smart’s reading,

though – and at times in Moretti’s, also – the conceptualization of
monopoly seems curiously internal with regard to its locational impli-
cations, and thus not entirely congruent with the ‘strange intonation’
which mars the Count’s otherwise ‘excellent English’ (p. 15). The
Count, in such readings, is far too English, his foreignness successfully
elided beneath his mastery of the discourses of ﬁnance which he aspires
to take, arguably, not to an extreme but to a logical conclusion of
absolute possession and control, whether the object be ﬁscal or physi-
cal. Monopoly, for Smart, implicates the ﬁnancial interiority of the
nation rather than replicating its external relationships in the greater
world – this is the threat of the ‘rogue trader’, as it were, over and above
that of the imperialist. The paradox is that, viewed through his success
within the discourses of ﬁnance and accumulation, Dracula may func-
tion for a time as the ultimate Englishman.

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Such things take the vampire far from images of empire and imper-

ial conquest. Yet Smart and Moretti effectively hold the key to the
novel’s curious inversion of imperial politics and colonial relationships.
The conventional postcolonial reading of Dracula, as has been acknowl-
edged, is synecdochal – the vampire is not Dracula, the character, but
imperial Britain encoded and inverted, the invading nation invaded
by its own processes of invasion and cultural inﬁltration. It matters
not, in such readings, whether the Count might be equated with any
other racial group: the implication is that the ‘they’ has become a ‘he’
or an ‘it’ – and that this ‘he’ or ‘it’ occupies a position once held by the
‘us’ that is now the threatened ‘they’. For all this, though, Count
Dracula resolutely retains his status as a ‘he’ – an individual, Moretti’s
monopoly capitalist, or his equivalent ﬁgure in the consciousness of
empire.

Count Dracula is thus not merely implicated within the imperial

mythology of combatant and aspiring races but is a participant in an
equally pervasive and potent myth of colonialism – that of the Great
Man or Imperial Hero. Though the myth of individual achievement –
emblematized as it may be, for example, through unlikely images of
Pharaoh (single-handedly) building the pyramids – has been much dis-
credited by modern historians, it still retains a certain currency with
regard to nineteenth-century perceptions as to how empire was assem-
bled. Empire, even when lauded by the nation-state, is seldom a con-
certed policy arising from a central or governmental source. As Dennis
Judd observes, late-Victorian British policy-makers ‘were generally reluc-
tant to commit themselves either ﬁnancially or in terms of time and
energy to a wholesale, virtually non-stop, process of colonial expan-
sion’.

That said, successive British governments were for the most part

‘content to let capitalist entrepreneurs undertake the dirty work of
conquest and penetration on their behalf’.

Judd exempliﬁes Cecil Rhodes as one such ﬁgure, but parallel laurels

might be claimed by Robert Clive in the eighteenth century, or by Sir
George Goldie and Sir William Mackinnon in Rhodes’s own day. What
is clear, though, is that imperialism – or the viewing of imperialism –
inclines to the personiﬁcation of signiﬁcant movements and events in
much the same way as modern criticism, except that the notion of racial
synecdoche becomes secondary to the myth of the exceptional leader.
The great man may, if the myth is enhanced, come to symbolize some
of the supposed or perceived qualities of the nation he represents, even
though his quest – as Judd argues of Rhodes – remains individualistic
and ﬁscal even where it embraces the notion of a nationally or racially

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deﬁned empire.

Even in the midst of this mythologization, his name

remains, ensuring that his status is still deﬁned through individual iden-
tity, selfhood and perceived personality rather than national or racial
origin pure and simple. It is that abiding self, that identity of the ex-
ceptional individual, rather than the broader racial context of origins,
which has cities or countries named after it – Stoker names a ﬁctional
pioneering settlement after one of his later heroes, just as, by the time
of his death in 1902, Rhodes had ‘countries named after him’.

It is

this individuality to which statuary is raised, and which lends its
many names to political movements and systems of conquest and
government.

Count Dracula, in Stoker’s novel, is depicted as just such an individ-

ualist. He operates, and has always operated, not at the behest of a gov-
ernment, nor in the van of some unequivocally nationalistic yearning
or aspiration, but as one who annexes in his own right, and often in
his own name, with armies that effectively disappear behind the
grandeur of self. ‘Here I am noble’, the Count asserts in his Transyl-
vanian stronghold, ‘I am boyar; the common people know me and I am
master’ (p. 20). Dracula, admittedly, retains the racial imperative,
encoded in his proud boast to Harker that ‘We Szekelys have a right to
be proud’ (p. 28), but this racial ‘we’ becomes progressively undermined
as the chronicle of Szekely/Dracula history is recounted for the Eng-
lishman’s beneﬁt. The irony of Harker’s recollection of the Count’s
memoirs of past battles is vested in the latter’s use of an ‘I’, or more
emphatically a ‘we’ which causes him to speak ‘as if he had been present
at them all’ (p. 28). The vampire at ﬁrst clariﬁes this usage, which Harker
at one stage suggests is ‘like a king speaking’ (p. 28), through an asser-
tion that ‘to a boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride
. . . their glory is his glory . . . their fate is his fate’ (p. 28). Subtly, in
Dracula’s own account, punctuated by rhetorical questions and ren-
dered verbatim by Harker, the Count’s ‘ “we” . . . spoke almost in the
plural’ (p. 28), appears to move from a speciﬁc association with the
Szekelys – ‘Who more gladly than we throughout the four nations
received the “bloody sword” . . . ?’ (p. 29) – to a more individualistic ref-
erence point within the Dracula family itself: ‘who was it but one of my
own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his
own ground?’ (p. 29, my italics). The ‘who’ emphatically bridges the
gap between the race, the family, and the individual – and that indi-
vidual, as Van Helsing later suggests, may well have been the speaker
himself, ‘that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over
the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-Land’ (p. 240).

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Van Helsing draws support for this attribution from the work of

an explicitly academic associate, ‘My friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth
University’ (p. 240). Modern critical writing has consistently associated
this ﬁgure with that of Arminius Vámbéry, dismissed as merely ‘an
adventurer and master of obscure languages’ by Stoker’s most recent
biographer, Barbara Belford, but better known in his own day as a trav-
eller, political writer and, indeed, ‘chair of languages and oriental liter-
ature in the University of Pesth’.

Much critical energy has been

expended upon speculation that Vámbéry provided Stoker with histor-
ical information which allowed him to model the character of the
vampire Count upon the warlord Vlad the Impaler, the historical
Dracula. The status of the ﬁctional Arminius, though, might arguably
be more than a simple acknowledgement of this unsubstantiated rela-
tionship. If the ﬁn-de-siècle reader was inclined to associate the ﬁctional
Arminius with Vámbéry, then he or she might well be inclined also to
recall that the Professor was not merely a renowned linguistician but
was also acknowledged as ‘a master of eastern lore . . . [and] one of the
keenest observers of eastern politics.’

Arminius’s status in the novel,

therefore, is arguably as much that of a mythologist, even an ethnolo-
gist, than that of a conventional historian. Arminius is implicated in
the cultural myth of that ‘great and noble race’ (p. 241) – the family
Dracula rather than the Szekelys – as much as in its factual history. In
a sense, through association with this and with Vámbéry’s well-known
belief in ‘the regenerative power of Western civilisation’, the ﬁctional
Arminius becomes the ideal bridge between the folk mythologies of the
past and the East, and the political iconographies of the present and the
West. Arminius, who, like Dracula never presents his own account in
the novel, becomes another eastern source to be mediated by the
Western voices who control the novel and who shape the invasion text
through the prevailing imagery of Western empire. Harker, Van Helsing,
Arminius and even Count Dracula, who speaks infrequently but
emphatically, are all functioning within the contemporary myth of the
Great Man, the Rhodesean Colossus, rather than that of the race, pure
and simple. It is the Count, not the Szekelys nor even the East, that is
most clearly and consistently rendered as the threat to be encountered.

The postcoloniality of Dracula is thus more complex than might ﬁrst

be imagined. The myth of races and of racial invasion, so frequently
encountered in contemporary criticism, is not the single focus or sole
implication of the Count’s individual campaign in England. Though
undoubtedly available as a contextual locus of unease in the nineteenth
century, this myth is perhaps more important as a factor in the politics

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of contemporary criticism, where the rhetoric of oppressive nationality
has eclipsed that of celebrated individuality. The individual, indeed, is
arguably paramount in the novel, as Van Helsing strikingly observes
when he suggests that the Count ‘have done this alone; all alone!’
(p. 321). Count Dracula travels alone to England and Lucy Westenra,
his sole convert – if vampirism might be equated to a religion or a polit-
ical creed – herself functions not as a dedicated or supportive foot soldier
but as an individualist in her own right, acting as predator both self-
ishly and locally. If such behaviour – Harker’s fear of the Count’s cre-
ation of ‘a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons’ (p. 51) – might
be still construed an imperialism, the Count’s most-quoted remark
about the expansion of his inﬂuence might well serve as a corrective.
‘Your girls’, says the vampire to the assembled men-folk, ‘are mine
already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine – my crea-
tures to do my bidding, and to be my jackals when I want to feed’ (p.
306). The vampire’s words, though, evoke not the language of invasion
but that of the hierarchicalized imperial world, the symbolic jungle
which Van Helsing later adopts as an emblem of the vampire’s preda-
tion. The coda to the Count’s boast is crucial. The jackal, ‘nocturnal in
habits and cowardly in nature’, is no equal of those predators with
which it chooses to be associated: ‘The jackal has frequently been
named the “lion’s provider,” from the belief that it guided the king of
beasts to prey. But there appears to be no truth in this idea; the jackal
usually accompanies the larger carnivora in the hope, no doubt, of par-
ticipating in their prey.’

The emphatic and possessive ‘my’ both

demonstrates a familiarity with the jungle myth, embraced by Kipling
among others, whilst conclusively locating power and ownership within
singular hands: ‘when I want to feed’.

There is no reciprocity here, but

only the celebration of the single-minded individual – so beloved of
Western imperialism – and of his gratiﬁcation. Other vampires are
merely incidental, a consequence – ‘like as the ripples from a stone
thrown in the water’ (p. 214) – rather than an intention of the singu-
lar invasion.

Notes

1. Maurice Richardson, ‘The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories’, Twentieth Century

166 (1959), 419–31.

2. See, for example, Terry Phillips, ‘The Rules of War: Gothic Transgressions in

First World War Fiction’, Gothic Studies 2, 2 (2000), 232–44; Lucy Armitt,
‘The Magical Realism of the Contemporary Gothic’, in David Punter, ed., A
Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 305–16; Jerrold Hogle,

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‘The Gothic at Our Turn of the Century’, in Fred Botting, ed., The Gothic
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 153–80.

3. Fred Botting, ‘Future Horror (The Redundancy of Gothic), Gothic Studies 1, 2

(1999) 139–55, at p. 141.

4. Ibid., p. 140.
5. Ibid.
6. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. M.K. Joseph (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1980), p. 100.

7. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One, an Introduction, trans.

Robert Hurley [1976] (London: Penguin, 1984), pp. 5, 7, 8.

8. See, for example, Maja-Lisa von Sneidern, ‘Wuthering Heights and the Liver-

pool Slave Trade’, English Literary History 62 (1995), 171–96; Christopher
Heywood, ‘Yorkshire Slavery in Wuthering Heights’, Review of English Studies
38 (1987), 148–97.

9. Christopher Heywood, ‘Africa and Yorkshire Unchained’, in (ed.), Wuthering

Heights by Emily Brontë (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002), pp. 57–70
at p. 63.

10. Ibid., p. 68.
11. Nina Auerbach, ‘Magi and Maidens: the Romance of the Victorian Freud’

in Lyn Pykett, ed., Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions (London: Longman, 1996),
pp. 22–38 at p. 23; Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 1.

12. Jules Zanger, ‘A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews’, English Liter-

ature in Transition 34, 1 (1991), 32–43 at 36. Elsewhere, though possibly
less convincingly, Stephen D. Arata suggests that ‘For Stoker’s audience,
Dracula’s invasion of Britain would conceivably have aroused seldom
dormant fears of an Irish uprising’: see ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula
and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies 33 (1990), 621–45,
at 63.

13. H.L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 231. Brantlinger deﬁnes imperial Gothic
in Chapter 8 of his Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,
1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 227–54.

14. As Jules Zanger admits, respect for Christian ceremonial or iconography

plays no part in the stereotype of the Jew in a racist British culture which
can be tentatively dated back to 1145. See ‘A Sympathetic Vibration’, 37.

15. Rhys Garnett, ‘Dracula and The Beetle: Imperial and Sexual Guilt and Fear in

Late Victorian Fantasy’ in Rhys Garnett and R.J. Ellis, eds, Science Fiction Roots
and Branches (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press [now Palgrave Macmillan],
1990), pp. 30–54, at p. 30.

16. British possession, if not inﬂuence, has historically been negligible in the

Balkans: see Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: the Imperialism of the
Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 1. An 1896 map,
reproduced on p. xiii, suggests that the Carpathian Mountains form the
border of the Balkans, the territory of Transylvania itself lying within
the borders of political Austria-Hungary. The Balkans, ﬁctionalized as the
Land of the Blue Mountains, also form the background to Stoker’s 1909
pseudo-vampire novel, The Lady of the Shroud. In this work, however, Stoker
explicitly develops the notion of the region as having had interests in
common with Britain in the past. See Bram Stoker, The Lady of the Shroud,

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ed. William Hughes (Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books, 2001), p. 290,
cf. p. 303.

17. As Harker’s employer, the Exeter solicitor Mr Hawkins, suggests, Harker ‘is

discreet and silent, and has grown into manhood in my service. He shall
be ready to attend on you when you will during his stay, and shall take
your instructions in all matters’: Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. A.N. Wilson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 17. Subsequent references are to
this edition, and will be given in parentheses in the text.

18. Illyria, the location of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, signiﬁes (admittedly in

common with other regions in the Balkans) a ‘semi-mythical remoteness, an
imaginative “end of the known world”, an area distant but still recognisable
in many respects’: Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, p. 9.

19. Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English

Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 141;
Christopher Frayling, Nightmare: the Birth of Horror (London: BBC Books,
1996), p. 107.

20. Cf. Schmitt, Alien Nation, p. 141. This notion of racial (or racialized) union

in the face of hostility is also a theme in The Lady of the Shroud, where the
Land of the Blue Mountains opposes the adjacent Turkish cultural and
military presence, and where the Balkan states unite in a confederation to
which Turkey itself eventually becomes a signatory: see Stoker, The Lady
of the Shroud, pp. 325–9, 343–4.

21. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist’, p. 640.
22. Anon., ‘Fox-Hunting’, The Illustrated Globe Encyclopædia of Universal Infor-

mation, ed. John M. Ross (London: Thomas C. Jack, 1882), 12 vols, vol. 5, p.
99.

23. On the consequences of Australian fox-hunting, see Terence Carroll, Diary

of a Fox-Hunting Man (London: Futura, 1984), p. 75.

24. To wear pink, or the livery of any hunt, without being a member of the same,

would of course be a social transgression of consequence: see G.R.M. Dev-
ereux, Etiquette for Men, second edition (London: Pearson, 1904), p. 78.

25. R.S. Summerhays, ‘Stopping Earth’, Summerhays’ Encyclopaedia for Horsemen

(London: Frederick Warne, 1966), p. 315; Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-
Hunting Man [1928] (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), p. 33.

26. Carroll, Diary of a Fox-Hunting Man, p. 62. Strictly speaking, fox-hounds are

always referred to as hounds rather than dogs: see Devereux, Etiquette for
Men, p. 78. Van Helsing, as a Dutchman, would probably not know of this
convention.

27. Anon, ‘Fox’, The Illustrated Globe Encyclopædia of Universal Information, ed.

Ross, vol. 5, p. 98; Carroll, Diary of a Fox-Hunting Man, pp. 88–9. The Count
is described as ‘cunning’ by Van Helsing (p. 240).

28. Anon, ‘Fox’, p. 98; Stoker, Dracula, p. 18.
29. Carroll, Diary of a Fox-Hunting Man, p. 86.
30. Ibid., pp. 74–5, 89–90.
31. Robert A. Smart, ‘Blood and Money in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: the Struggle

Against Monopoly’, in John Louis DiGaetani, ed., Money: Lure, Lore and
Literature (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 253–60, at
p. 254.

32. Ibid., p. 257.

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33. Dennis Judd, Empire: the British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present

(London: Fontana, 1997), p. 119.

34. Ibid., p. 120.
35. Ibid., p. 117.
36. Bram Stoker, The Man (London: Heinemann, 1905), p. 351; Judd, Empire,

p. 119.

37. Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (London:

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), p. 260; Anon., ‘Vámbéry, Arminius or
Hermann’, The Illustrated Globe Encyclopædia, ed. John M. Ross (London:
Thomas C. Jack, 1884), 12 vols, vol. 12, p. 393.

38. Anon., ‘Vámbéry’, p. 393.
39. J.M. Roberts, The Triumph of the West (London: Guild Publishing, 1985),

p. 330.

40. Anon, ‘Jackal’, The Illustrated Globe Encyclopædia, ed. John M. Ross (London:

Thomas C. Jack, 1884), 12 vols, vol. 6, pp. 541, 542.

41. Rudyard Kipling, ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, from The Jungle Book [1894], The Jungle

Books (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 35.

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Beyond Colonialism: Death and
the Body in H. Rider Haggard

Andrew Smith

103

It is difﬁcult to think of another novelist with such obvious colonialist
credentials as Sir Henry Rider Haggard. Haggard worked in the colonial
service in the 1870s in South Africa and played an administrative role
in the British annexation of Boer-held territories. He raised the Union
Jack during the ceremony on 24 May 1877 that formally registered the
annexation of the Transvaal Republic. Indeed at this ceremony he
completed the oration when Melmoth Osborn, the political secretary to
the Secretary for Native Affairs, was so overcome by emotion that he
was unable to complete the speech. Even when his writing career be-
came his main source of income Haggard was still active in the colo-
nial service and was a tireless campaigner for the development of British
colonies. He proposed that, after the First World War, selected British
subjects, resident in Britain, should be compelled to emigrate to, and so
repopulate, threatened colonial countries. In 1895 he stood, unsuc-
cessfully, for election as a Conservative member of parliament for East
Norfolk and he was involved with organizations such as the Council of
Public Morals and the National League for Promotion of Physical and
Moral Race Regeneration.

He was a close friend of Kipling and was

knighted twice, in 1912 and 1919, for his political, rather than literary,
activities.

Such a pedigree has inevitably conditioned the perception of his

writings. Wendy R. Katz, for example, in Rider Haggard and the Fiction of
Empire (1987) has argued that Haggard was guilty of, amongst other
things, anti-Semitic racial stereotyping and misogyny.

Marysa Demoor

argues that Haggard’s tendency to exploit racial stereotypes was a con-
sequence of his adherence to the formal, structural, demands of the
adventure novel. However, Demoor also argues that even ‘Haggard
was not unaware of the complicated dialectic between “savage” and

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“civilized” ’, and that when he deviated from the narrative constraints
of the adventure novel he sought to break down these colonialist
binary distinctions.

This ambivalence in his writings has recently

attracted much critical attention. Barri J. Gold, for example, in an argu-
ment concerning images of motherhood and genealogy in She (1887)
argues that:

Haggard’s novel generally supports English patriarchy and imperial-
ism. Still, at certain moments, the narrative betrays itself by reveal-
ing the power and importance of the mother, the mythic character
of European scientiﬁc superiority, and the violence of English im-
perial and patriarchal practice.

Tim Murray has argued, in a similar if more demotic vein, that ‘There
is more to [Haggard] than his simply being a hack imperialist, just as
there was to Stevenson and Kipling, but it is difﬁcult to ﬁnd amongst
all the imperialist puff’.

My principal argument in this chapter is that whilst Haggard’s writ-

ings do consolidate certain prejudices, they also explore the possibility
of moving beyond a colonialist identity politics reliant on conceptions
of racial otherness. I want to pursue the idea that Haggard’s work con-
tains two, seemingly irreconcilable, impulses. One is to lament the
decline in Britain’s colonial status (in works published between 1887
and 1923) and the other is to positively explore a new (putatively post-
colonial) identity politics. This paradox can be historically accounted
for as a consequence of the refashioning of colonialist subjectivity, made
necessary by Britain’s colonial demise. In effect a different kind of Other
is needed in order to situate the colonial Self. For Haggard the problem
which confronts him is that the older dualities on which colonialism
rested, of Self and Other, West and East, White and Black, are threat-
ened with erasure during the period. My argument is that in their rep-
resentation of the relationship between the living and the dead,
Haggard’s novels symbolically represent this moment of transition. She,
for example, explores at great length the possibility of death and resur-
rection in ways which suggest that Haggard is using such a Gothic
exploration to map what another kind of life, one beyond colonialism,
might look like. This is because his construction of the relationship
between the living and the dead symbolically formulates a new type of
identity politics, one in which the self’s very instability functions as a
threshold into another possible world that transcends the colonial. In
this way Haggard’s model of a life beyond death constructs a world of

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community relations (where there is companionship with the dead) in
which the possibility of racial harmony is explored. On a symbolic (and
theoretical) level it suggests the need to kill off the old (the colonial)
and embrace the new. However, because this transition is associated
with loss and grief Haggard also references this change in an emotional
register which emphasizes the despair felt on the part of the dying
colonial subject.

I will explore Haggard’s fascination with death in the four novels con-

cerning the adventures of Ayesha: She (1887), Ayesha: The Return of She
(1905), She and Allan (1921) and Wisdom’s Daughter (1923). My central
claim is that death and the possibility of an after-life in Haggard’s writ-
ings, anticipates a postcolonial space in which all kinds of races and
classes co-exist. Barri J. Gold has acknowledged that it is ideas about
death and the possibility of resurrection which form the central drama
of She. The question which Gold asks is: ‘How can this novel be so bla-
tantly fascinated not only with death but with corpses in particular?’

The eroticization of corpses in She, for Gold, is subtly linked to the way
in which Ayesha blurs the distinctions between the living and the dead.
This fascination with liminal states (between the living and the dead)
symbolically refers to a moribund colonialism which is able neither to
look back nor to progress. It also indicates the presence of a colonial
unconscious which develops Freudian ideas of the uncanny whereby
images of ontological order are shattered by an inability to distinguish
between life and death. For Freud, the return of the dead is one of the
most uncanny experiences as it suggests the precariousness, the perme-
ability, of our quotidian notions.

Ayesha becomes both the double of

a colonial subjectivity, and the pathway to a world which transcends
colonialism.

However, the idea that the dead are not quite dead and that the living

are not quite alive does not have a sole provenance in Freud’s uncanny.
It also ghosts more material readings of death (which also produce a
Gothic context for Haggard’s writings) such as that to be found in
George Henry Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life (1860) in which he
claims that in chemical terms the dead never quite die (and that given
proper care people might live until they were 400 years old).

T.H.

Huxley in Lessons in Elementary Physiology (1868, revised 1885) restates
the idea that the transmutation of chemical particles suggests death
never really occurs and that, crucially, ‘death’ suggests a model of
democracy which is fed by this transformed ‘life’. For Huxley the ‘scat-
tered atoms’ of the decomposed body ‘will be gathered into new forms
of life’, so that:

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The sun’s rays, acting through the vegetable world, build up some of
the wandering molecules of carbonic acid, of water, of ammonia, and
of salts, into the fabric of plants. The plants are devoured by animals,
animals devour one another, man devours both plants and other
animals; and hence it is very possible that atoms which once formed
an integral part of the busy brain of Julius Caesar may now enter into
the composition of Caesar the negro in Alabama, and of Caesar the
house-dog in an English homestead.

In death a distribution of the body becomes possible, a distribution
which crosses all kinds of boundaries, racial, national and the species
divide. The end of empire, the end of dynasties (the end of Caesar)
makes this possible. Death thus becomes a curiously democratic process
and Haggard develops this in symbolic ways.

In the novels concern-

ing Ayesha he establishes a debate about life and death, empire, science
and sexuality, one which reverses a colonialist’s charter in order to map
out what another world, one which exists beyond colonialism, might
resemble.

Haggard in She consciously compromises a quasi-Darwinian language of
natural hierarchies. Ludwig Horace Holly, the narrator, is a Cambridge
academic whose simian appearance belies his intellectual credentials;
he states that he once overhead a conversation between two women in
which one of them testiﬁes that his appearance had ‘converted her to
the monkey theory’.

Later in the novel, in the adventures set in south-

east Africa, he is likened to a baboon. Holly possesses intellectual and
physical strengths, and he comes to function as a foil to Ayesha’s alter-
native ideas about life, death and empire. The novel’s critique of a crude
form of Darwinism, one which typically underpinned Western theories
of racial superiority, indicates Haggard’s interest in colonialist con-
structions even as he challenges them.

On one level the novel argues for the possibility of overcoming death

through reincarnation. Leo Vincey, Holly’s ward, becomes for Ayesha
the reincarnated form of the priest Kallikrates whom she had loved, and
killed for inﬁdelity, some 2000 years previously. We are later informed
that Ayesha had bathed in the Fire of Life, which had granted her this
extended existence. The novel provides one explanation, from Ayesha,
that Leo Vincey is the resurrected Kallikrates, and a biological explana-
tion, via Holly, that Leo is a genetic descendant of Kallikrates.

The principal lesson that Holly learns from Ayesha concerns the

inevitable decline of empires. Ayesha explains that empires are transi-

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tory because they are subject to death and rebirth in much the same
way as people. Ayesha, however, is also an arch-imperialist and Holly
witnesses in Ayesha an image of a debased and violent colonialist atti-
tude which, through exaggeration, provides a demonic version of
British imperial ambitions. This becomes clear towards the end of the
novel when Ayesha threatens to depose Queen Victoria and rule the
dominions; for Holly the anxiety is that:

In the end she would, I had little doubt, assume absolute rule over
the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth, and,
though I was sure that she would make ours the most glorious and
prosperous empire that the world had ever seen, it would be at the
cost of a terrible sacriﬁce of life.

(p. 193)

The novel is quite explicit in its condemnation of empire-building even
whilst elsewhere it falls back on to some crude racial stereotyping in the
representation of the cannibalistic tribe, the Amahagger. However, this
anti-imperialist message is paralleled by a more Gothic and complex one
which concerns life and death; it is one in which Haggard tries to turn
such an anti-colonialist impulse into a metaphysics, and in doing so
develops an alternative politics. This metaphysics produces an alter-
native, non-Darwinian, version of events. However, in this debate
Darwinian ideas function as the Other to this alternative world and are
therefore crucial to its construction.

The novel organizes a series of dialogues between Ayesha and

Holly in which Ayesha’s occupies what is, for Haggard, a discredited
Darwinian position. Shawn Malley has argued that:

[Ayesha] is depicted not as a mystic, but as a scientist who . . .
approaches psychic phenomena as objects of rational, psychological
study. The universe Ayesha inhabits and explores as a eugenicist,
astronomer, chemist, physicist, geologist, and archaeologist is a
decidedly Darwinian one.

However, it is not thereby a purely theoretical one. Ayesha is a scientist
who experiments through a process of trial and error which contrasts
with Holly’s more abstract, non-heuristic and naive rationalizations.
Holly learns not only about the passing of dynasties, but also that what
he understands as life requires revision. Ayesha may be a eugenicist,
who has created various races during her 2000-year wait for Kallikrates,
but she also understands that the living and the dead are more closely

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related than is allowed in Holly’s rationalistic philosophy. In this way
Ayesha functions as a strange Gothic hybrid composed of malicious and
egotistical impulses (a strange female version of the evil genius, or the
mad scientist) whose very philosophy constitutes a Gothic metaphysics
of death. Her Darwinian associations are reﬂected in her ability to create,
and manipulate, biological life, yet her occult philosophy acknowledges
that there is more to existence than just that. As in the science of Lewes
and Huxley the dead are never quite dead, and the living are never quite
alive. The novel might appear to endorse a pseudo-Darwinian moment
when Ayesha seemingly dies when she enters the Flame of Life for a
second time and shrivels into a monkey-like form, but the sequels to
the novel seek to account for her subsequent transformations.

It is these transformations which are important, because Ayesha’s con-

tinuing presence means that history is kept alive, and throughout her
many transformations and her 2000-year existence, that history is a
colonial history. Holly is a professional archaeologist who tries to keep
the past alive, but the very presence of Ayesha is a testimony to the con-
tinuing presence of the past. History might in this instance be a history
of empires and their decline, but there is also a narrative concerning
the after-life in which the colonialist racial hierarchies are held in
abeyance. In the Ayesha novels Haggard develops a scientiﬁc agenda
that suggests the living and the dead are closely related. This is turned
into a metaphor for Ayesha’s struggle between the spiritual and physi-
cal worlds. The body never really dies (as witnessed by Ayesha’s many
transformations) but this suggests the presence of a spiritual dimension
that exists independently of the body. The body is freighted not only
with desire but also by social, sexual and racial differences. In ‘life’ char-
acters are placed within a bodily hierarchy that relies on animal iden-
tiﬁcations. Holly is a baboon, Leo is a lion, the Amahagger elder Billali
is described as a goat. These animal corollaries exemplify the ‘natural’
place of each character whilst they are, more obviously, indicators of
their respective social positions. The ‘death’ of the body eradicates these
differences and suggests the possibility of a more democratic, poten-
tially postcolonial, spiritual dimension.

Laura Chrisman argues that ‘Ayesha/She functions not simply as

imperialism’s other but as its double, antithesis, and supplement. Her
presence – and her gruesome extinction – are necessary for imperial self-
legitimation. But this is an imperialism already in crisis.’

The double

nature of Ayesha is underlined by the way in which the conﬂation
between the living and the dead tropes the collapse between Self and
Other, a collapse which erases difference and destabilizes an imperial

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language of Othering. The novel indicates the presence of an uneasy
tension in which the relationships between West and East, Self and
Other, Living and Dead deﬁne each other. This tension creates stasis,
but the very irresolution of opposites means that the imperialist argu-
ment, which accords greater weight to the Occident than the Orient,
cannot be developed. For Chrisman, the novel’s use of such dualities
captures the essence of Haggard’s identity politics in which the older,
colonial, sense of self deﬁned by its relation to a racial Other is com-
promised, so that She represents ‘the idea of an identity deﬁned through
displacement, meditation through others, but equally troubled by the
alternative, an absolute and untouchable, autochthonous existence’.

Ayesha’s imperious and imperial standing represents this failure of a
now-demonized subjectivity. Ayesha also represents, by acting as the
gateway to a world of the dead, the possibility of moving beyond
such a world of colonial identity politics. It is through how the dead
live and why it is necessary to search them out that Haggard con-
siders the construction of an alternative form of identity politics. For
Chrisman such a move indicates the emergence of a new form of an
‘imperial (un)conscious’, a new tension between knowing and unknow-
ing, between the living and the dead, in which the dead are allowed to
have their say.

The signiﬁcance of the transition from the living to the dead is further

developed in Ayesha: The Return of She (1905). The story is told, signiﬁ-
cantly, from the point of view of the dying Holly, who views his
impending death with an anticipation that, once free of the body, he
will discover another, more spiritually meaningful, life. This other world
is secular, as it is associated less with God than with Ayesha herself.
Holly recounts a moment when he and Leo are buried by a snowdrift:
‘I abandoned hope and prepared to die. The process proved not
unpleasant. I did not see visions from my past life as drowning men are
supposed to do, but – and this shows how strong was her empire over
me – my mind ﬂew back to Ayesha.’

As Ayesha seems like an im-

perial leader in life so she seems to command the world of the dead.
Later in the novel Holly believes that Ayesha resides in a ‘hall of shades’
where her empire is speciﬁcally over the dead, here:

She seemed a Queen of Death receiving homage from the dead. More,
she was receiving homage from dead or living – I know not which –
for, as I thought it, a shadowy Shape arose before the throne and
bent the knee to her, then another, and another, and another.

(p. 211)

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The moment is not quite as supernatural as Leo and Holly’s imagina-
tions suggest, because, crucially, Ayesha indicates that she only exists as
a product of their projected anxieties and wishes, ‘I . . . am but a magic
wraith, foul when thou seest me fair; a spirit-bubble reﬂecting a thou-
sand lights in the sunshine of thy smile, grey as dust and gone in the
shadow of thy frown’ (p. 216). What she reﬂects, demonically, is their
own colonial ambitions. This is less an Orientalist projection of other-
ness than a suggestion that their ambivalence about identity is mani-
fested through her. The colonial Other (Ayesha is variously Greek/Asian)
becomes their ‘(un)conscious’ as she represents their desire to move
beyond identity politics into a world of death, where identity is sus-
pended. This also refers to what Gail Ching-Liang Low has termed the
‘colonial uncanny’ in which the ‘uncanny . . . reﬂects back to the colo-
nial identity another image of itself based on the inversion of its normal
structure: a home that turns out to be some other being’.

On an overtly

political level, if in She Ayesha had appeared as a rival to Queen
Victoria, it was only because she seemed like an exaggerated version of
her. There Ayesha was a Queen with grand imperial ambitions, isolated
in a profound and lengthy state of mourning for her lost love, and to
a contemporary reader these parallels with Victoria must have been
quite clear. In Ayesha: The Return of She, Ayesha is also a dangerous colo-
nialist who has designs on the subjugation of China; for Holly ‘Ayesha’s
ambitions were such as no imperialist-minded madman could conceive’
(p. 239). It is Ayesha’s attachment to the physical world which diverts
so markedly from the spiritual world which she also, at least for Holly
and Leo, inhabits. It is these two aspects of Ayesha which compose an
explicit debate about the relationship between body and soul, a debate
which relocates (as Ayesha acknowledges in her status as imperial
projection) anxieties that colonialism has become demonic and
needs replacing (killing off) with a new form of community politics (the
strange companionability provided by the dead). This means that the
living and the dead are brought together because the death of colo-
nialism is the start of a new kind of life. Ayesha represents both of these
worlds, and so becomes a complex and ambivalent trope for a fear of
imperial decline.

These questions concerning authority are repeatedly played out

through the different demands of the body and the soul. The base
demands of the ﬂesh conﬂict with the higher qualities of a spiritual
world. This suggests that this other world, this spiritual dimension, is
governed by a need for community and compassion which is not to be
found in the more war-like imperial world. That Haggard wants to

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emphasize the conﬂict between these two worlds is illustrated in She
and Allan (1921). It is also a novel which focuses on the way questions
of psychological and emotional instability reﬂect wider instabilities in
colonialism.

She and Allan is Allan Quatermain’s (signiﬁcantly posthumous)

account of his encounter with Ayesha. The novel develops the idea that
the self is unstable. Allan acknowledges that the self is naturally a series
of selves, none of which is more deﬁning than any other. Allan notes
at the outset, ‘of one thing I am quite sure, we are not always the same.
Different personalities actuate us at different times’.

This uncertainty

also reﬂects on authority by posing the question of what controls the
self, as Allan notes: ‘Everything rules us in turn, to such an extent
indeed, that sometimes one begins to wonder whether we really rule
anything’ (p. 2). Such an anxiety makes historical sense given that
Haggard is writing in the 1920s from a vantage point which enables him
to reﬂect on Britain’s colonial decline. The tensions in She between a
range of binary oppositions indicate the presence of an emergent re-
negotiation of colonial subjectivity. In this later novel this tension is
broken because Allan defends a positive model of racial otherness. Allan
is thus not associated with colonialism, as seen in the greeting given
him by the chief Umslopogaas, ‘. . . I greet you well, Bold one, Cunning
one, Upright one, Friend of us Black People’ (p. 27), and this is also
apparent in Allan’s subsequent condemnation of the racially motivated
hatred of Thomaso, who refers to Umslopogaas as ‘that nigger’ (p. 55).
However, in keeping with the earlier novels, this political message exists
alongside a fascination with the dead. Allan is not quite the imperial
adventurer he ostensibly appears to be; his quest is not one for geo-
graphical or economic dominance, but rather for the dead. Zikali, a
mystic and psychic hermit who shares some powers with Ayesha, notes
‘You . . . seek certain women who are dead to learn whether they still
live, or are really dead, but so far have failed to ﬁnd them’ (p. 34). Im-
perial ambitions are replaced by this search for another world. Also,
although Allan is struck by Ayesha’s beauty, he is not drawn to her in
the way that Leo and Holly were in She; rather Ayesha becomes impor-
tant to Allan only to the degree that she provides a conduit to the world
of the dead. He asks her, ‘I come to ask you, O Ayesha, to show me the
dead, if the dead still live elsewhere’ (p. 154). However, Ayesha would
rather teach him a crude democratic philosophy in which all kinds of
differences become erased: ‘Learn Allan . . . that all humanity is cast in
the same mould’ (p. 184), so that outward quests for others (whether
dead of alive) can be replaced by inner journeys where all identity is to

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be found. This also extends the suggestion in The Return of She that
Ayesha exists as a ﬁgure of projection – she becomes a mirror of a colo-
nial unconscious that, in a moment of the uncanny, searches for the
dead in order to develop a new consciousness, one which comes into
existence through an assertion of similarity rather than difference. The
Other becomes the same in a gesture which effectively abolishes the dif-
ferences between genders, races and cultures. However in order to dis-
cover this identity it becomes necessary to lose that marker of social,
racial and biological distinction – the body. In order to effect this and
to enable Allan to meet the dead, it becomes necessary to kill Allan by
degrees. Ayesha tells Allan, ‘To kill you outright would be easy, but to
kill you just enough to set your spirit free and yet leave one crevice of
mortal life through which it can creep back again, that is most difﬁcult
(p. 254). Allan makes this journey in a chapter entitled ‘The Lesson’.
Crucially it is memory, or rather the failure of memory, that becomes
signiﬁcant. Whereas Ayesha is associated with remembrance, Allan is
associated with forgetting. This means that for Allan this other world
is not quite what he had anticipated. He sees a group of ‘people’
composed of men, women and children approaching him: ‘all these
uncounted people were known to me, though so far as my knowledge
went I had never set eyes on most of them before. Yet I was aware that
in some forgotten life or epoch I had been intimate with every one of
them (p. 258).’ He discovers his father, brothers and sisters who have
sensed that they have been called but are unable to discern Allan’s pres-
ence because they have forgotten him. The explanation given by
Mameena (Allan’s deceased former African love) is that as they have lost
their bodies they have lost the need to desire and consequently to love
as ‘they have grown too ﬁne for love’ (p. 261). For Allan, a deﬁnitive
man of action, this loss of the body compromises his sense of identity
and yet an attachment to that heroic body is not enough. The pre-
dominant mood of the novel is one of grief. Meeting the dead is not
the consoling experience that it should be, but there is also a view that
this other world contains an image of community where compassion
prevails. The problem is that in order to join this world you need to be
properly dead and not merely in a liminal state of suspended anima-
tion. Allan is therefore granted access to a world which promises a better
‘life’ even as his feelings of alienation register disappointment that he
appears to have been forgotten in that world. Allan, consequently, sees
this other world as hell rather than heaven: ‘I had seemed to descend,
or ascend, into Hades, and there had only seen things that gave me little
joy and did but serve to reopen old wounds’ (p. 289). To move beyond

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the body is to move beyond desire, and it is this human need for desire
which, according to Ayesha, explains Allan’s restless quest for adven-
ture and disappointed soul-searching. She tells him, ‘Hast never heard
that there is but one morsel bitter to the taste than desire denied,
namely, desire fulﬁlled? Believe me that there can be no happiness for
man until he attains a land where all desire is dead’ (p. 276). This might
sound like a version of Hell but Haggard gives it a spiritual credibility
which associates it with peace and freedom. The novel therefore
rehearses the tensions found in the earlier novels and tries to move
beyond them. However, it also provides a political reassessment of grief.
Allan’s feelings of loss are not ones that reﬂect on the departed, but ones
which reﬂect on his own loss of self.

The basic tension in the novels is between a lament for a lost colo-

nial world and a desire to move beyond that colonial world. A loss of
self is necessary if a truly postcolonial form of subjectivity can be devel-
oped, one that is not predicated on a notion of otherness. Allan’s liminal
moment is thus symbolic of the colonial subject, drawn to a world of
colonial adventure and yet yearning for images of peace and compas-
sion from which they are, as yet, excluded. It is this idea which Haggard
addresses in the ﬁnal novel of the quartet.

Wisdom’s Daughter, published in 1923, narrates the events of She,

touches on She and Allan and is actually set within the time-scale of
Ayesha: The Return of She. Haggard can do this because the chronology
in the novels is not the same as the order in which they were published:
She and Allan is from Allan Quatermain’s posthumous papers and refers
to an earlier part of the story. Wisdom’s Daughter is therefore also a re-
assessment of those earlier novels and self-consciously reﬂects on the
earlier constructions of colonial anxieties. Haggard regarded Wisdom’s
Daughter as the clearest distillation of the ideas which he had developed
throughout his writing career, On 1 August 1923 he wrote to Rudyard
Kipling, ‘In that book is my philosophy . . . the Eternal war between
Flesh and Spirit, the Eternal Loneliness and Search for Unity’, which was
an acknowledgement of Kipling’s earlier judgement on the novel ‘that
it represented the whole sum and substance of your convictions along
certain lines’.

One of the signiﬁcant factors of the novel is that it tells

the story from Ayesha’s point of view, rather than mediating her
through the kind of hero-worshipping engendered in Holly, and to a
lesser extent in Allan Quatermain. I am not going to suggest that this
enables the subaltern to speak because Ayesha is both Other and the
same to the European adventurers that she encounters. However, her
version of events does try to complete the cycle even though, in keeping

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with the ambivalence that had governed the other novels, the novel
closes on a moment of incompleteness and requires an external edito-
rial hand to close the tale.

The story is not a simple retelling of the earlier narratives, and in fact

often contradicts some of the earlier claims (Ayesha, for example, had
told Allan Quatermain that Kallikrates was beautiful but intellectually
deﬁcient, and that her wait for his return was a curse, not a duty of
love). These contradictions are quickly explained as the consequence of
a necessary politicking. The novel relates how Ayesha became a priest-
ess of Isis, who represents a chaste spiritual world, but that her future
has largely been determined by the spiteful actions of Aphrodite, who
had introduced her to a world of desire. Aphrodite taunts Isis with ‘We
are at war and in this war I shall be conqueror, for I am eternal and all
life is my slave, because my name is Life’; whereas Isis belongs to a world
without desire, and so represents the dead.

Ayesha, whilst nominally

a priestess of Isis, is more obviously of Aphrodite’s party. Her imperial
ambitions are apparent from an early age, ‘I sought to rule the
world’ (p. 13), yet this is tempered by the view that empires are tran-
sient. Standing in the ‘desolate Valley of Dead Kings . . . I came to know
all the littleness of Life and the vanities of earth. Life, I saw, was but a
dream; its ambitions and its joys were naught but dust’ (p. 28). Ayesha
becomes the earthly representative of Isis and her advice and wisdom
means that she becomes much prized by various regimes with colonial
ambitions because she appears to be able to tell their futures and advise
on military tactics. Her mission as prophesied to her is to ‘destroy Egypt,
or rather her apostate priests and rulers, and afterward once more build
up the worship of Isis in some far land that should be revealed to me’
(p. 87). The novel however, makes it unclear whether she is following
the decrees of the spiritual Isis or the mischievous Aphrodite. Ayesha’s
interest in empire and her desire for Kallikrates appear to be a conse-
quence of Aphrodite’s inﬂuence, whereas her intimations of a world of
the dead come from Isis, and this becomes the form through which the
clash between the physical and spiritual realm is played out. Ayesha
acknowledges that ‘there is one grandeur of the earth and another of
the spirit’ (p. 188), and that the former is a world of passing imperial
ambitions. Signiﬁcantly such wisdom is granted to Ayesha by a visit
from the dead who ‘told me strange stories of the past and of the future;
tales of a fallen people, of a worship and a glory that had gone by and
been swallowed in the gulfs of Time’ (p. 215). The notion that the dead
are not quite dead is developed in Ayesha’s encounter with the Flame
of Life. She comments that ‘Perhaps . . . not Life but Death inhabited

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that ﬂame’ (p. 239), an anxiety represented in the title of the novel’s
ﬁnal chapter ‘In Undying Loneliness’. In her wait for Kallikrates’ return
‘I sought out the dead in their habitations . . . and found not a few of
them’ (p. 299) and although she gains a companionship with the dead
she fails to ﬁnd the spirit of her father. To relinquish life is to gain a
community but this is necessarily at the expense of one’s personal
history, a suggestion which echoes a colonialist strategy of erasing dif-
ference by suppressing the past.

A loss of self becomes both liberating and frightening and this relo-

cates Haggard’s idea that to move beyond a colonialist politics creates
a new version of community, although at the price of a self-identity
which has been fashioned through Empire. However, Ayesha now occu-
pies a position which echoes that of Allan Quatermain, as she too con-
fronts the impersonality of death and yet is forced to acknowledge that
the communality of the dead provides a meaningful escape from the
constraints of everyday life (especially as she is condemned to inhabit
Kôr until Kallikrates’ return). The point seems to be that to move into
a world of the dead requires a new formulation of subjectivity. If at the
time there was, in cultural terms (via spiritualism), in medicine (such
as in the work of Lewes and Huxley) and in psychoanalysis (in the form
of Freud) a claim that our conceptualization of death was inadequate,
then the issue becomes one of knowledge. The implicit question raised
by these novels is how is it possible to know this non-material world,
how is it possible to imagine a world which exists beyond colonial
notions of otherness? These novels ultimately produce a version of a
possible world which exists beyond the colonial, although they fail to
explain that world properly because they exist on its cusp, as Laura
Chrisman notes:

Haggard is an apologist of Empire, a writer not noted for his sophis-
tication. Precisely because of this he serves as an example of how
imperialism even at its most basic is capable of constructing itself
as a contradictory process, of commenting upon its own self-
mythologising, and economic, imperatives, while in the course of
pursuing them; is able, in sum, to reveal a great deal of self-
knowledge but doesn’t know what to do with this knowledge.

For Haggard the anxiety is that in joining the dead you lose a sense of
who you are, but that this becomes a necessary journey to make given
the transient nature of both life and empires. Haggard therefore repre-
sents, if not a postcolonial politics of liberation, at least a stage on

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the way to such a liberation, with all the attendant anxieties which go
with this sense of loss and the requirements of a new necessary self-
fashioning.

Notes

1. Peter Beresford Ellis, H. Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Inﬁnite (London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 6–7.

2. Wendy R. Katz, Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1987).

3. Marysa Demoor, ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show: Rider Haggard’s Exotic

Romances’ in C.C. Barfoot, ed., Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic
Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997)
pp. 173–82, at p. 179. I am also aware that there is another debate here which
concerns the degree to which Haggard is consciously in control of colonial-
ist images. My view in this essay is that the texts seem to diverge so markedly
from the life, that the texts’ challenge to colonialism can only be explained
in historical terms. Yet, it seems to me that Haggard’s subversion of
Darwinian ideas is knowing, although he seems unaware of the political
consequences of such a subversion. In this view I follow Laura Chrisman,
whose arguments I develop elsewhere in this essay. Where I indicate that
Haggard has developed a critical line on colonialist ideas, this is to suggest
what the texts do, rather than to claim that this was a consciously devel-
oped project on his part.

4. Barri J. Gold, ‘Embracing the Corpse: Discursive Recycling in H. Rider

Haggard’s She’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920, 38, 3 (1995),
305–27, at 305.

5. Tim Murray, ‘Archaeology and the threat of the past: Sir Henry Rider Haggard

and the Acquisition of Time’, World Archaeology 25, 2 (1993), 175–86, at 180.

6. Gold, ‘Embracing the corpse’, 316.
7. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) in Art and Literature: Jensen’s Gradiva.

Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works, trans. J. Strachey, ed. A. Dickson
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 339–76.

8. George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, 2 vols, vol. 2 (Edinburgh

and London: Blackwood, 1860), pp. 416, 439–40.

9. T.H. Huxley, Lessons in Elementary Physiology [1868, revised 1885] (London:

Macmillan, 1898), pp. 20–1.

10. Huxley’s use of analogy in this instance also suggest that his argument is as

much cultural as medical.

11. Henry Rider Haggard, She ([1887] Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1995), p. 2. All

subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text.

12. Shawn Malley, ‘ “Time Hath No Power Against Identity”: Historical Conti-

nuity and Archaeological Adventure in H. Rider Haggard’s She’, English
Literature in Transition 1880–1920, 40, 3 (1997), 275–297, at 290.

13. Laura Chrisman, ‘The Imperial Unconscious? Representations of Imperial

Discourse’, Critical Quarterly, 32/3 (1990), 38–58, at 45.

14. Ibid., 47.
15. Ibid., 57.

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16. Henry Rider Haggard, Ayesha: The Return of She [1905] (Polegate: Pulp

Fictions, 1998), p. 47. All subsequent references are to this edition, and are
given in the text.

17. Gail Ching-Liang Low, White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonial-

ism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 114.

18. Henry Rider Haggard, She and Allan ([1921] New York: Ballantine, 1978),

pp. 1–2. All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the
text.

19. Ellis, H. Rider Haggard, pp. 1, 248.
20. Henry Rider Haggard, Wisdom’s Daughter: the Life and Love Story of She-Who-

Must-be-Obeyed ([1923] New York: Amereon House, n.d.) p. 8. All subsequent
references are to this edition, and are given in the text.

21. For a more substantial account of how a denial of the past is related to colo-

nialism see Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (London and New York:
Routledge, 1994), pp. 139–70.

22. Chrisman, ‘The Imperial Unconscious?’, 40.

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Horror, Circus and Orientalism

Helen Stoddart

118

My accidental discovery recently of a Marvel Comics pop-up book,
Ringmaster and His Circus of Crime, featuring the Incredible Hulk,
provoked in me a certain nostalgic amusement; but it also provided
some lurid conﬁrmation of what I had long suspected to be a well-
worn connection in the popular imagination between circuses and the
Gothic.

The six-page children’s book has the Hulk arrive fortuitously

late to a circus which is in the process of being held in thrall by an evil
Ringmaster:

‘I am the Ringmaster! Watch me closely! Do not take your eyes off me
for a second! Look at the spinning lines on my hat – the stars on my
jacket! Now you are all under my power!’

Lucky for him, Bruce Banner is late for the show, so he is not

hypnotised.

(pp. 1–2)

Bruce leaps in and tackles the mesmerizing Ringmaster whose lackeys
are in the process of pick-pocketing the entranced audience’s money
and valuables, though they emerge from their trance astonishingly
ungrateful:

Thanks to the Hulk, the Circus of Crime was captured. But,
since no one knows that, some think the Hulk was helping the
criminals!

‘Bah!’ bellows the jade giant, ‘even when Hulk does good, people

think he’s bad!’ And with one huge leap, the most misunderstood
man-monster on Earth disappears into the night.

(pp. 5–6)

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Interestingly, the ringmaster is pictured with a little white beard and
looks very much like an Uncle Sam ﬁgure who turns the audience’s patri-
otism against them by using the very stars and stripes featured on his
hat and coat to dupe them into a state of complete passivity.

Already,

though, his proclamation, ‘I am the Ringmaster’ invites a reading of the
circus ring as a hypnotic circle which, under his inﬂuence, mirrors and
controls the human eyes it attracts towards it: the ring is both a ﬁgure
for the fascinator/fascinating and for the eye of the fascinated.

The associations made in this small piece of juvenilia between circus

and outlawry – and even criminality – are both stark and highly famil-
iar. The ‘outlaw circus’ has a long history with its roots stretching back
at least to the circus’s origins on the south side of the Thames when it
grew up alongside various other, mostly either socially disreputable or
legally dubious, forms of leisure and entertainment.

This suspicion of

the circus because it at least seems to side-step the law, if not always
being in full contravention of it, has been perpetuated in numerous re-
presentations of it going back to Dickens’s Hard Times (1854).

Secondly,

hypnotism or indeed mesmerism is the central plot device here and it
is one that percolates throughout all the texts I shall discuss in this
chapter.

The implications of this practice become more fully and mean-

ingfully visible when they are read with reference to Edward’s Said’s
concept of Orientalism, a cornerstone of postcolonial theory which con-
tributes much to an understanding of the many public and aesthetic
anxieties which have surrounded circuses, both real and ﬁctional.

Thirdly, there is a clear implication here that criminality is contagious;
in ﬁghting the circus Bruce Banner is, at least in the minds of the igno-
rant, bound up with it. Of course this is also partly because Banner has
the unusual facility of being able to turn into an enormous green man
of the sort you might more reasonably expect to see in a carnival freak
show. It is this act, therefore, which also foregrounds the phenomenon
of bodily transformation which will be so central to this discussion.
Although many ﬁctions feature ways in which the function, appearance
or identity of a body may be transformed (especially in the area of
cartoon characters where, after all, lots of super heroes do this), the
power to transgress the conventionally understood limits of mental
privacy and interiority have their history in Gothic and fantasy litera-
ture and in this genre they predominantly appear as signs of the
uncanny or of a potentially evil genius at work. This evidence of ocular
power, as Judith Halberstam has already pointed out, frequently works
to mark out individual ﬁgures in terms of a racial difference that is
speciﬁcally identiﬁed as Jewish.

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The texts which locate the circus as a site for outlawry and outrage,

as I suggest above, are numerous, but can be divided into those which
incorporate some element of supernatural activity and those which can
be classiﬁed as more straightforward thriller or crime romances. In the
latter category could be included the popular murder mystery literature
and thrillers which have circus or carnival/sideshow settings or ﬁgures
such as Nigel Morland’s The Corpse at the Circus (1945),

Andrew Spiller’s

Phantom Circus (1950),

Anthony Abbot’s The Murder of the Circus Queen

(1933),

Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke (1938),

and Jean

Marsh’s Death Visits the Circus (1953),

as well as ﬁlms such as The

Unknown (dir. Tod Browning, 1927), The Devil’s Circus (dir. Benjamin
Christiansen, 1926), Man on a Tightrope (dir. Elia Kazan, 1953), Circus of
Horrors (dir. Sidney Hayers, 1960),

Circus of Fear (dir. John Moxey,

1966), Carney (dir. Robert Kaylor, 1980) and Funny Bones (dir. Peter
Chelsom, 1994). The texts which I will focus on here, however, all
harbour one of two elements which are key for this argument. They
feature human ﬁgures whose coherence, recognizability or mental and
bodily privacy is challenged in a way which either is overtly, or is sus-
pected of being, supernatural. The agent or force which precipitates this
physical and/or mental interference frequently does so through a form
of intense ocular confrontation which may itself be offered to a paying
audience as a form of spectacular entertainment. At the same time the
agent of invasion is either directly or indirectly implicated as a super-
natural or ‘otherworldly’ power through reference to longstanding Ori-
entalist discourses. The small piece of twentieth-century children’s text
discussed above, therefore, is bound to a longer history of viewing the
dangers enacted and embodied by circus and carnival performers in a
way which can be related both to Said’s concept of Orientalism and to
dramas or tropes more commonly rehearsed in Gothic ﬁctions.

The history and development of the circus and of modern Oriental-

ism, perhaps unsurprisingly, share a parallel trajectory. Both have their
origins in Britain in the 1770s, moving towards increasing global expan-
sion and pre-eminence in the nineteenth century; lingering glories in
the early twentieth century were then closely followed by post-World
War II crisis and decline.

During this time the circus borrowed the

colonial impulse to travel the world, discovering and exploiting new
entertainment markets whilst selling itself in the West through increas-
ingly popular shows. These represented the trophies of Western expan-
sion, often within sensational and spectacular dramas reconstructing
aspects of distant landscapes that formed the backdrop to dramatiza-
tions of Western military conquests in Africa, the Americas and Asia.

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At the same time depictions of these circus shows within representa-
tional forms of art have often worked both to fetishize Eastern beauty
and to stage popular fears about the dangers and monstrosity which
came to be associated with the East. By the early nineteenth century
European spectators were able to view the performing wild animals from
around the world which had become the trophies of imperial expan-
sion and which were showcased ﬁrst in circuses and later in zoos. As
William Hazlitt’s now famous essay, ‘The Indian Jugglers’, demonstrates,
they also enjoyed human performances which were new and visually
transﬁxing.

Jugglers had clearly been a familiar sight since at least the

medieval period but now new and more daring ones had arrived in
Britain from Asia and the Mediterranean countries and these were
accompanied on the streets of London by sword swallowers and snake
charmers.

Hazlitt’s essay attempts to capture the startling skill of the performer

while also emphasizing the juggler’s Oriental origins and the connec-
tion between this and his power to fascinate:

To catch four balls in succession in less than a second of time, and
deliver them back so as to return with seeming consciousness to the
hand again, to make them chase one another like sparkles of ﬁre, or
shoot up ﬂowers or meteors or throw them round his neck like
ribbons or like serpents . . . to follow them with his eye as if he could
fascinate them with its lambent ﬁre.

Thus, ﬁguratively, the balls are like ‘ribbons’ and ‘serpents’, but the
juggler’s eyes do not just perceive these objects, they dominate and
control them. Hazlitt imagines the juggler’s project as a ﬁre (a ﬁgure for
the power of imagination itself) which is both startling and also poten-
tially dangerous. What is more, Hazlitt, you could say, is almost mes-
merized by fascination itself since his fascination is doubled by the
fascinating power of the juggler over his own juggling balls; it is a fas-
cination which is both exotic and, in its rapid movement and bodily
dexterity and beauty, constitutes an entrancing visual spectacle. John
Whale, however, observes that:

although one reviewer refers to the sword-swallowing as the ‘chef
d’oeuvre of the marvellous’ which is done with so much ease as to
prevent any pain to the spectators, it is this part of the act which
actually generates most unease and which breaks the spell of aston-
ishment produced by the mesmeric facility of juggling.

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The phrase ‘breaks the spell’ jumps out of this passage as a conﬁrma-
tion of the suggestion of the presence of mesmerism within the dynamic
between juggler, balls and spectator. More interesting, however, is the
fact that although Hazlitt is delighted to witness a display of physical
agility and, subsequently, to jazz it up with ﬁgurative implications of
magic and even witchcraft (‘the work of witchcraft, and yet sport for
children’, p. 129), he is suddenly stopped in his rhetorical tracks and
horriﬁed when the spectacle moves on to become a dramatic illustra-
tion of the permeability of the body’s material and ﬂeshly boundaries.
The fact that the sword causes no pain when it enters the man’s body
only makes matters worse in this respect because it implies the presence
of an unnatural power or potential. What is crucial here is the sugges-
tion that the performer’s skills are acceptable while their dynamics are
fully visible, but they immediately become a source of profound anxiety
once they harbour the possibility of private, interior and undisclosed
practices or potential.

Later in the nineteenth century these ﬁgures would be replaced by

stage mesmerists and hypnotists who gained widespread public notori-
ety by combining the power of ocular fascination with an (apparent)
ability to break through the pre-established limits of the private self to
an undisclosed or unconscious mind. Daniel Pick has carefully and
extensively outlined the early connections made between mesmerism
(which also came to be of interest to European scientists in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) and both Judaism and
Orientalism.

The connections made between these three in early-

nineteenth-century literature and culture contributed heavily to the
widespread and now well-documented demonization of Jewish people,
and the impression of a strange and untrustworthy people possessed of
a controlling and sinister gaze was most effectively solidiﬁed by the
popular association of all three with lives dominated by vagrancy,
inscrutability and forms of theatrical charlatanism.

The innately the-

atrical qualities of mesmerism itself meant that it developed quickly (by
the 1820s) into a variety and music-hall entertainment and of course it
is George Du Maurier’s ﬁctional creation, Svengali, who now stands as
the most notorious embodiment of mesmerism’s Oriental and Jewish
roots.

At the same time Pick points out that, although ‘political diatribes

and ﬁction all contributed to the pool of writings about the disturbed
minds and the mesmeric power of the Jews’, writing on the subject of
mesmerism at the end of the nineteenth century ‘sometimes noted that
the real origins of trance-induction lay not in Vienna or Paris, but much

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further to the East’ (p. 132). It is this very particular cultural demo-
nization of Eastern European ﬁgures capable of ‘trance-induction’ that
implicates the signiﬁcant role in nineteenth-century anti-semitic
discourses of Gothic literature, and most speciﬁcally Bram Stoker’s
Dracula.

Although Montague Summers’s scholarship demonstrates the

widespread presence of a European vampire mythology before this
point, Stoker’s novel established a version of the vampire in which cere-
bral and sexual domination became key deﬁning features as well as ones
which inﬂuenced subsequent depictions.

Not only this, but even in

the ﬁrst chapter Jonathan Harker is told that the Carpathian villagers
who make a sign of the cross and ‘point two ﬁngers’ towards him are
offering a ‘charm or guard against the evil eye’ (p. 6) and later Mina’s
account of Lucy’s seduction in the grounds of the Abbey gives details
of the ‘long and black’ ﬁgure leaning over which has ‘a white face and
red, gleaming eyes’ (p. 90). Lucy herself can only remember that the
ﬁgure was ‘dark’ with ‘red eyes’ (p. 98), features which stand in stark
contrast to Arthur Holmwood’s eyes which, we are told, ‘gleamed’ with
‘the strong young manhood that seemed to emanate from him’ (p. 121).
Thus Dracula’s unnatural and powerful gaze is dramatically present in
the novel both as a code of racial otherness and as a source of horror.
But the novel’s careful genealogical portrait of the ancestral line of ‘we
of the Dracula blood’ (p. 29) back to the pre-modern and ancient
‘tribe(s)’ (p. 28) of Europe, together with his facility for shape-changing
into various forms of predatory animal has further signiﬁcant
implications.

As Pick points out, it was a Jewish scientist named Albert Moll who

sought to undo the association between Judaism and mesmerism, since
it was believed that the latter clearly indicated the survival of something
connected to a primitive or pre-modern mentality, as well as powers
which recognized no social, sexual or racial boundaries, and was there-
fore potentially transgressive in all these areas. Moll gathered examples
of the phenomenon from Egypt, Japan, Persia, Africa and various
Islamic countries so that by the 1840s speculation began about relative
racial susceptibility. It seems almost paradoxical that mesmerism be
associated both with less ‘civilized’ societies (eastern or pre-modern) as
well as with the potentially politically, psychologically and sexually
transgressive powers to unseat civilized minds, and yet this is also pre-
cisely the combination of attributes which make Dracula, and the vam-
pires which followed him, such a threatening combination of primitive
and voracious appetites and tyrannically hypnotic mental powers.
Importantly, the feared psychological power of Jews was also seen to

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have an inverse relationship to their physical strength since the con-
nection made between Jews and ‘the “shadow side of things” ’ and thus,
Pick argues, between Jews and women meant that ‘the dominant diag-
nosis’ was that ‘the “womanly” physical weakness of the Jews necessi-
tates their adoption of particular techniques of defence and attack.’

Of particular relevance here, however, is Pick’s speculation about how

these three connected terms of Orientalism, mesmerism and Judaism
inﬂuenced the arrangement of the original psychoanalytic scene:

With his patients reclining on a couch, and his own chair placed
behind their heads Freud deliberately eschewed the eye-to-eye
contact that had been a consistent feature of nineteenth century
hypnotic entertainment and medico-psychiatric treatment. One
reason he gave for this was that he could not bear to be looked at all
day long by his patients, but perhaps more importantly it served to
emancipate the patient from the traditionally powerful gaze of the
physician or psychiatrist. On the other hand, recognition of the
patient’s enormous emotional investment in the analyst, with all its
displacements and condensations of earlier relationships, was to
become central to Freud’s own theorisation of the patient’s ‘trans-
ference’ to the analyst, a clinical concept very signiﬁcantly developed
by his followers.

Pick suggests here that Freud’s decisive move to place his patients on a
couch in front of him, thereby removing the possibility of eye-to-eye
contact between patient and analyst, was a defensive gesture made in
anticipation of the connections which might be made between mes-
merism, hypnotism and himself as a Jew. He was also, Pick argues, keen
to avoid any suggestions of theatricality since ocular confrontation
had constituted such a key feature of nineteenth-century hypnotism
as popular stage entertainment. Even so, the issue of patients’ mental
transferences to their analysts and their analysts’ potentially unnatural
inﬂuence over their patients has been fundamental to the work and con-
cerns of subsequent analysts and has featured widely in the formation
and critiques of the disciplines of psychoanalysis.

William Lindsay Gresham’s thriller Nightmare Alley provides a parti-

cularly striking dramatization of the inter-association of some of the
above terms within a ﬁctional circus/carnival context.

On the whole

the novel belongs to that category of circus ﬁctions described above
which do not contain any supernatural element. Although the central
ﬁgure is a stage ‘mentalist’ named Stanton Carlisle, he is depicted as a

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cynical hustler and the narrative action works to debunk and expose
his sideshow act as hocus pocus, even if it does arrange itself formally
with reference to the tarot cards as each of the 22 chapter-titles refer to
one of the 21 tarots plus the Joker. Carlisle, however, is plagued with
guilt over the various deceptions he has practised and suffers also from
a recurrent paranoid nightmare (to which the novel’s title refers) in
which he is ‘running down a dark alley and rooms were vacant and
black and menacing on either side’ (p. 58). Ahead of him, ‘far down at
the end of it a light burned; but there was something behind him, close
behind him, getting closer until he woke up trembling and never
reached the light’ (p. 58). His worst mistake of all is made when
he arranges to see a psychologist to help him with his sleep loss. In
the ﬁrst moment that they are described as being together in the
same room, it is the dynamics of possible and impossible eye contact
in the consultation room which are the source of Carlisle’s initial
conversation:

‘Lie back on the couch.’
‘I don’t know what to talk about.’
‘You say that every time. What are you thinking about?’
‘You.’
‘What about me?’
‘Wishing you sat where I could see you. I want to look at you.’

(p. 136)

Clearly on one level Carlisle’s anxiety is based on his nascent sexual
desire for the psychologist Lilith Ritter for whom he will later fall:
Lilith’s initial removal of ocular contact here merely intensiﬁes his
growing vulnerability in her presence. At the same time this scene is the
starting point for an elaborate conﬁdence trick played by a psycholo-
gist on a professional con man (Carlisle) who believes himself unstop-
pable. Not only do her professional skills match his, they supersede
them and he is thereby ﬁnally humiliated because the man Stanton
believes he is conning out of thousands of dollars (with the psycholo-
gist’s help) in order to be with her, turns out to be her partner in an
elaborate trick on him which he has been unable to detect. In the light
of Pick’s research outlined above, it is interesting therefore, that she is
not only female, but also that she is called Lilith Ritter, since Lilith is a
name of semitic origin which not only refers to a vampiric demon of
the night, but also to the evil ﬁrst wife of Adam who became the Devil’s
Dam.

Where Carlisle second-guesses human action and motivation,

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she is able to exert such sexual and psychological inﬂuence over him
that he acts entirely according to her instruction and, as he is led off
for psychiatric treatment, can no longer distinguish between nightmare
and reality: ‘Dream – Nightmare. Delusion. Nothing . . . nothing real.
Tongue . . . naked . . . talk . . . money . . . dream . . . nightmare’ (p. 192).
So although this is not strictly a supernatural novel, its interest in
sideshow ‘mentalism’ leads it to contrast this with the greater and,
in its terms, more sinister and powerful techniques of professional
psychological investigation in a way which produces a ﬁctional re-
statement of longstanding associations between femininity, Judaism
and sinister mental inﬂuence.

The suggestion of Lilith Ritter’s vampiric power over Carlisle as she

sucks out his powers of self-determination and rationality is emphasized
throughout the text in a familiar Gothic language which describes her
‘animal tastes’ and ‘superanimal’ brain which ‘always hooked into his
own by an invisible gold wire’ (p. 140) and her hand which turns from
‘warm’ to the ‘chilled’ hand of ‘a dead woman’ (p. 141). In moments of
trauma Carlisle persistently tries to cover and protect his eyes with his
hands but in his ﬁnal attempt to do so in Lilith’s presence she appears
to stop him as ‘it seemed that all the pain in him was concentrated in
the back of his right hand in a sudden, furious stab like a snake bite’
(p. 191) and she ﬁnally smiles triumphantly over him. Clearly this
implied connection between vampirism and an unnatural power to
manipulate unconscious (especially sexual) desire by a ﬁgure identiﬁed
as semitic is a clear echo of the anti-semitic impulse in Dracula. Yet it
is also easy to see what it is about the ﬁctional context of a circus or
carnival that allows it to accommodate vampiric ﬁgures so readily: they
are visually mesmerizing, physically restless and itinerant, bound up in
Western fears and fantasies about the East, physically and sexually
unstable and dangerous, a challenge to the boundaries between life or
death and wild or civilized, and blind to the class or racial status of those
they draw into their fold. As I have argued above, the intimate and par-
allel histories of the circus and Western colonial expansion mean that
it is easy to see why the texts I shall discuss here represent the circus in
ways which may perpetuate certain nineteenth-century colonialist and
Orientalist fantasies. At the same time it is clear that their distinctive
postcolonialism lies in the manner in which they act out residual,
perhaps instinctive, Orientalist fears (latent in Hazlitt) in a way which
both intensiﬁes the intimacy and the destructive power of the objects
of fear and betrays a much-quickened sense of loss and helplessness
amongst those who encounter those objects. It is in this sense that these

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representations of the circus and circus-sideshow ﬁgures are both more
modern and more Gothic than Hazlitt’s. For Hazlitt the Indian Juggler’s
power to ‘fascinate’ with his eyes operates as a metaphorical ﬁgure
through which Hazlitt (as an intellectual and a ﬁgure representative of
colonial power) articulates an idea about Romantic genius through his
greater power as an artist. In the twentieth-century texts I am looking
at, however, the power of the mesmerists is both irresistible and beyond
anyone’s control.

Such is violently the case in Eleanor Smith’s highly mediated short

story ‘Satan’s Circus’ (1932), in which a narrator relates a story told to
him by a juggler about the fate of a young circus co-worker named
Anatole, who dies violently while performing with the tigers in the
Circus Brandt.

The circus is run by Carl and Lya Brandt who, though

they profess to be Austrian, are said to be ‘queer people’ whom even
‘their own people’ call ‘gypsies’. Others have dubbed their show ‘Satan’s
Circus’ since they ‘wander the whole earth as though the devil himself
were at their heels’ (pp. 9–10). The juggler conﬁdes that he left the show
because he could not stand ‘working with people who give me the
creeps’ (p. 12) and he is not alone in his instinctual trepidation in their
presence. When the Brandts toured ‘in that wild part of Rumania [sic],
somewhere near the Carpathian mountains’, they emerged from their
caravans to discover that all the villagers had ‘scattered like rabbits’ and
‘on every door was nailed a wreath of garlic’ (p. 14), and the animal
menagerie was always terriﬁed of them. The young Anatole, a runaway
from the Foreign Legion, is targeted from the start as someone both dis-
pensable and highly open to blackmail. The text allows for no doubts
about the Brandts’ vampiric identity. It tells us of Carl’s ‘darting black
head like a snake’s’, his face, ‘yellow as old ivory’, his ‘tiny, dark,
imperial beard’, ‘sharp and broken teeth’ and ‘appearance of an addict’
(p. 16). These are mirrored in Lya’s absence of colour (‘all was all black
and white’), her eyes which burn like a ‘devil’s’, and the fact that she
would never show her teeth (p. 17). The circus mythology refers to her
as a ‘she-devil’ who ‘walks’ regularly at night, terrifying the animals (p.
26). She deliberately enters the circus ring one night while Anatole is
doing an act with the tigers, thereby causing his death, and is later seen
feasting on his already ripped and torn body. It is at this point that,
‘with all the ferocity of a starving animal she ﬂung herself upon the
body, shaking it, gripping it tightly to steady its leaden weight while
she thrust her face, her mouth, down upon that torn and bleeding
throat’ (p. 37). The circus’s night-time movements between towns, spec-
tacular offerings of near-death encounters, distraction of audience belief

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and harbouring of wild animals provides the perfect cover, in this story,
for these vampires by offering them a welcome complicity in, and cover
for, their sinister appetites. Like Dracula, the Brandts combine aristo-
cratic decadence (the ‘imperial beard’, ‘ivory’ complexion and addict’s
face) with racial otherness (the ‘black’ head and gypsy branding) and a
primitive, bestial appetite. Yet here the circus setting also creates a space
in which the tiger, far from functioning as a trophy of Western man’s
ability to tame and control even the most ferocious representatives of
the animal kingdom (and, by implication, the countries from which it
was taken), takes out the would-be tamer’s throat and is closely followed
by the vampire who shadows and replaces him.

Robert Young’s late Hammer horror ﬁlm The Vampire Circus (1971),

also presents an evil circus but its representation here in ﬁlm compli-
cates and intensiﬁes both the impact of the performers’ mesmeric
powers and their ability to interfere with the normal visual perceptive
function. In common with other Hammer productions of the period,
the ﬁlm is set in a vaguely nineteenth-century rural European past, this
time apparently in Serbia, though the characters’ names are Germanic.

The ‘Circus of Nights’ makes its appearance at the end of a debate
amongst local town ofﬁcials and professionals about the medical crisis
precipitated by what later turns out to be an outbreak of rabies, but
which is referred to at this point as a ‘plague’. Dr Kersch is infuriated
by the way the other townspeople indulge a belief that the disease may
be connected to an outbreak of vampirism 15 years earlier, the source
of which was Count Mitterhaus. We see him staked through the heart
at the start of the ﬁlm but learn that he is still buried in the town. As
a medical doctor Kersch’s impassioned outburst (‘Must you go on believ-
ing in old wives’ tales? The vampires exist only in legends, the imagin-
ing of diseased minds!’) constitutes the sort of bourgeois, rationalist
proclamation of the professionalism which is so typically at the heart
of Gothic, and especially Hammer, horror. At the same time it turns out
to be the cue for the arrival of the Circus of Nights whose members will
so spectacularly undermine Kersch’s exclusive faith in the material
world. Not only does their name form the last words on Mitterhaus’s
lips but now their entry in the ﬁlm is facilitated by a point of view shot
from Kersch, just as he condemns ‘the imaginings of diseased minds’,
‘legend’ and ‘old wives’ tales’, terms to which, through this cinematic
technique, they are immediately bound as the shot pans across from
him and down to the dancing dwarf who, followed by a ‘gypsy woman’,
leads them in. The smooth transition from the doctor’s outward gaze to
the consequent arrival of the players in the town square sets up a pattern

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of expectation and desire (even in denial) between the people of the
town and the vampires who will feed off them. This desire is structured
through a series of shot-reverse-shot sequences within the ﬁlm in which
the enquiry is initiated by the human and in which the object of their
gaze, in being visually present, is rendered more, rather than less,
ambiguous and possibly imaginary.

The most extended and striking example of such a technique occurs

in the sequence in which the romantic young couple Anton and Dora
sit in the front row of the circus watching the vampire’s twin children,
Helga and Heinrich, perform a fantastical acrobatics sequence.

The sequence begins with the smooth editing-together of shots of the
human acrobats’ bodies ﬂying up into the air with a shot of birds of
prey in the air, thus creating the visual impression that they are indeed
capable of magical transformation into birds. The audience’s gasps at
their acrobatic performance have already been rendered aurally ambigu-
ous in that they constitute a sound bridge between this and the previ-
ous scene in which Emile is shown on the verge of biting into the neck
of a young girl, Rosa. Thus the gasp of horror at another vampire victim
is conﬂated with the active pleasure and surprise of the delighted circus
audience: fear and desire expressed in the same cry.

As they land back to earth the acrobats face Dora and Anton and a

shot-reverse-shot sequence establishes a double eye-line match between
them which is then intensiﬁed by the twins’ internal diegetic voice
whispering ‘Dora’ at Dora and Anton. Clearly entranced, they are then
led into a carnival hall of mirrors. Perhaps for obvious reasons, the hall
of mirrors appears in a variety of other dark or fantastic ﬁctions about
the circus, including Charles G. Finney’s short story ‘The Circus of Dr.
Lao’ (1956)

and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes

(1963).

In each case it functions to expose a latent fear, absence and

hence vulnerability in the person who contemplates a reﬂection of
themselves which is then transformed into a frightening and danger-
ous image. This image turns out to be not so much a distorted reﬂec-
tion but rather an image of the character’s projected desire and fear
which has been wrenched (albeit from a willing victim) from a private,
mental space into a spectacular public frame. Instead of themselves,
Anton and Dora see the twins who beckon them further so that they
walk into and through the mirror to where Mitterhaus awaits them.
Thus the editing techniques, as well as the framing device of the mirror,
ensure that the twins, as well as Mitterhaus, are marked as both visu-
ally fascinating and imaginary. This means that the dynamic between
the vampires and their victims is more complex than merely one

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between a monster and its prey. A further example of the inclusion of
structural visual ambiguity appears in the sequence immediately fol-
lowing the circus’s arrival in town, in which two young boys approach
one of the circus wagons. As they peer into one of them their point-of-
view shot is presented as a series of rapidly alternating shots of a black
panther and of the vampire Emile (Mitterhaus’s cousin). The spectator’s
eye is only allowed to rest on each of the two images for about a second
and this creates a confusion about whether it is the eyes of the young
boys which project confusion onto the object, or the panther/vampire
which is itself an unstable object. As in ‘Satan’s Circus’, the anti-semitic
connection between the vagrant, parasitic vampire and the mesmerist
is given a further Orientalist twist as the vampire becomes inter-
changeable with a wild and exotic animal. As I have suggested above,
it is also important that in all these encounters, the texts imply that
these monstrous, vampiric ﬁgures cannot be framed or even correctly
identiﬁed by the human eye precisely because theirs is the eye which
frames and controls. In this sense they represent a very Gothic uncer-
tainty about their physical existence even as, at the same time, they
guarantee the spectacular and fascinating power of these ﬁgures.

A similar, but more light-hearted, drama of about visual ambiguity

occurs at the beginning of ‘The Circus of Dr. Lao’ when a variety of dif-
ferent pairs of characters are presented hotly debating whether one
exhibit in the circus is a bear or a Russian (pp. 9–18). Although the nar-
ration is in the third person, it offers its readers no independent state-
ment about the ontological status of the exhibit. The ‘Catalogue’
attached to the end of the story lists and describes all the ﬁgures pre-
sented in the narrative (human, animal, mythical, geographical,
vegetable, religious) which contains both a ‘SONORAN GRIZZLY: The
country cousin living in Mexico of the great family Ursus Horribilis’ (p.
86) and ‘A RUSSIAN’ (p. 79). The ﬁrst question in the penultimate
catalogue section, entitled ‘THE QUESTIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS
AND OBSCURITIES’, is ‘Was it a bear or a Russian or what?’ (p. 91). In
both this and Vampire Circus, then, the curiosity of spectators is sharp-
ened by a circus ﬁgure which the text categorizes as human or animal
(but not both or either one) and it is the investigating eye of the circus
outsider that actively seeks out the curious and dangerous object.

In ‘The Circus of Dr. Lao’, however, Dr Lao, although a crude Orien-

talist stereotype and commonly referred to as ‘the Chink’, is a rather
benevolent if ‘screwy’ ﬁgure with no evil, demonic or power-hungry
plan. On the other hand, the bear is one of several ﬁgures that function
as textually unresolvable ontological conundrums. This means that,

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although thematically the narrative is full of overblown Orientalist fan-
tasies, and a sense of irreconcilably parallel Eastern and Western values
and symbols is set up (‘I have my own set of weights and measures and
my own table for computing values. You are privileged to have yours’,
p. 72), structurally this fantastical narrative itself cannot sustain the ‘sta-
bility’ and ‘sense of eternality’ which Said has identiﬁed as belonging
to Orientalist discourse.

Said has opposed the terms ‘vision’ and ‘nar-

rative’, associating them with, respectively, stasis or ‘synchronic essen-
tialism’ and ‘a constant pressure’ since narrative allows for the tearing
away of ‘detail’ from the habitual or repeated vision of the Orient to
which it has been attached. Yet what is most interesting about Said’s
distinction is the way he attributes to narrative the introduction of an
‘opposing point of view, perspective, web of vision; it violates the serene
Apollonian ﬁctions asserted by the vision’.

His ﬁgurative use of the

Greek god Apollo to denote Western classical conceptions of poetry and
music is itself an example of ambiguous narration since ‘Apollonian’
may be taken to refer both to Apollo, the Greek God of poetry, music,
archery and prophecy, as well as to Apollonius of Perga or Apollonius
of Tyana. The latter, a Pythagorean philosopher/mathematician, was
also a renowned magician and it is this ﬁgure who appears as the magi-
cian in Dr Lao’s circus. He is both a magician on his own and a player
in Lao’s ﬁnal show in the circus triangle (not the ring). Although he
takes on Satan in this show with a cruciﬁx, thereby reducing Satan to
a ‘burst of ﬂame in the centre of the tent’, the applause he receives is
‘unconvincing’ and the magician, ‘drowned in thought . . . plodded
back to his quarters’ (p. 71).

Thus the ‘serenity’ and stability of the

Western vision which Said names ‘Apollonian’ is doubly unsettled here
in a narrative in which this name is not only a sign for sophistry and
shape-changing but one which is greeted by an ingloriously ‘sparse’
appreciation by the audience.

Of course it is important to qualify this application of Said’s terms to

a ﬁctional text. For him, narrative means the writing of history and not
literary narrative and he sees this narration of history as being opposed
to other ‘synchronic’ discourses within Orientalism, such as law and
economics. Although Said constantly mobilizes a rhetoric of theatre,
spectacle and performance in his early accounts of Orientalist discourses
in the nineteenth century, he is also careful to point out that his focus
here is not on aesthetic representations as such, but scholarly ones.

Bart Moore-Gilbert points out, Said goes on to consider literature and
painting in his later volume, Culture and Imperialism, but the texts he
considers here belong fairly exclusively to the canons of high art (Verdi,

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Austen, Conrad).

Said displays a certain implicit faith in the idea that

the ‘characteristic “complexity” of this work allows it to escape being
mechanically determined by the “latent” power of the base’. Yet, as
Moore-Gilbert suggests, not only does he analyse these texts within a
framework which already means they are limited to conﬁrming the
assumptions that already underpin his argument, but ‘he also at times
comes close to reinscribing some of the problems involved in the older
humanist model of “common culture” but this time on a global, not a
national scale’.

What is most interesting about Moore-Gilbert’s critique

of Said for this argument is his claim that ‘the kind of “ideological” cri-
tique developed in Orientalism is primarily thematically orientated and
therefore generally oblivious to the complications and instabilities
apparent in different kinds of textuality, notably in ‘literary’ instances
of colonial discourse’.

Whereas for Said literature and ﬁlms may be just

another vehicle for Orientalist discourse, Moore-Gilbert draws attention
to the inherent and particular complexities and fault lines which are
constituitive of all forms of ﬁctional articulation.

The texts (ﬁlms and literature) discussed above all constitute exam-

ples of the way circus performers have functioned to represent in the
popular European imagination, often through popular entertainments,
associations between the circus, Orientalism, mesmerism and unnatural
mental inﬂuence. The circus or the carnival forms a crucial backdrop in
each, dramatizing a form of highly spectacular popular culture that has
an implicit but highly visible connection with colonialist history and is
allied to the popular genre of Gothic fantasy. The cross-fertilization
between the two, Gothic and circus, furnishes these texts with a series
of key ﬁgures – transforming bodies, crazy mirrors, mesmerizing ring-
masters, con men, vampires, murderers and magicians – which act out
thrilling possibilities for reimagining the limits of the human body and
mind while also conﬁrming Hazlitt’s anxieties about the trouble with
things you cannot see. Gothic as a genre has always invested in intense
spectacle whilst coupling this with warnings about magic, dissimulation
and the untrustworthiness of ocular perception, or even supernatural
inﬂuence, which shadow such pleasures. Indeed ﬁlm in particular has
always acted out anxieties about the possibility that eyes are not simply
organs which facilitate human ocular reciprocation, but are also poten-
tially organs of seduction, control, censure and violence. Yet these texts
also all contain a complex and ambivalent articulation of both projected
desires and denials around a set of monsters who are familiar but other,
fascinating but unrepresentable, beautifully exotic but equally terrify-
ing, clandestine yet always on show. It is in these terms that they can

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be understood as dramatizations of speciﬁcally Gothic postcolonial
anxieties.

Notes

1. Stan Lee, Ringmaster and His Circus of Crime (London: Pan, 1983). All sub-

sequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text.

2. The ringmaster here is particularly resonant of the famous American clown,

Dan Rice, who performed in various capacities between 1848 and 1881. Rice
sported distinctive chin whiskers as well as a top hat and red and white
striped jacket, although the Uncle Sam persona is one he adopted rather than
originated. See Robert J. Loefﬂer, ‘The World of Circus Becomes a Model for
Early Political Cartoons’, White Tops, 56, 1 (1983) 19–26.

3. For further details of this reputation see, Marius Kwint The First Modern

Circus: Astley’s Amphitheatre in London, 1768–1830 (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2002).

4. Charles Dickens, Hard Times ([1854] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
5. As Roger Luckhurst has pointed out, although these terms have become

almost synonymous, mesmerism became a scientiﬁcally disreputable term in
the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas Anton Mesmer’s theory of ‘animal
magnetism’ (a term coined by Mesmer in the 1780s) had claimed that the
process of mesmerism involved the passing of mesmeric ﬂuid, between
mesmerist and patient, by 1843 James Braid offered the term hypnosis to
describe the purely physiological effect of monotonous repeated movement
of the eyes. In scientiﬁc circles, therefore mesmerism became discredited in
favour of the more discreet scene of hypnosis in which the process of trans-
ference between one individual and another might remain untainted by any
sort of material contact. Thus, from the mid-century onwards the distinc-
tion between the two terms also marked a distinction between popular the-
atrical entertainers who continued to advertise themselves as mesmerists
and scientiﬁc investigations into the possibility of hypnotism. See Roger
Luckhurst, ‘Trance-Gothic’ in Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, ed.,
Victorian Gothic (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 148–167.

6. Edward Said, Orientalism; Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin,

1995).

7. See Eve Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (London: Methuen,

1986), pp. 18–9, 34; and Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: the Making of
Monstrosity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

8. Nigel Morland, The Corpse at the Circus (London: Vallancy Press, 1945).
9. Andrew Spiller, Phantom Circus (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1950).

10. Anthony Abbot, The Murder of the Circus Queen (London: W. Collins and Sons

& Co., 1933).

11. Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke (London: Chatto & Windus, 1938).
12. Jean Marsh, Death Visits the Circus (London: John Long, 1953).
13. A novelization of this ﬁlm was written by George Baxt (London: Mailton

and Co., 1960).

14. Edward W. Said cites the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt (1798) as the start-

ing point for modern Orientalism whereas the circus began in London in

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1768, though it did not begin to spread its wings internationally until Philip
Astley set up an amphitheatre in Paris in 1783 and Charles Hughes, of the
Royal Circus, built his in St Petersburg and Moscow in 1793. See Edward
Said, Orientalism, pp. 42 and 87–8; and Marius Kwint, The First Modern
Circus.

15. As Robert W. Jones points out in the context of the formation of London

Zoo, ‘the animals were to be viewed as metonyms for imperial triumph,
civic pride, the beneﬁcence of God or scientiﬁc discovery.’ He also argues
that with ‘Prince Albert as its President from 1851 until his death in 1861,
the Zoological Society of London could claim (and it often did) to be part
of this greater colonial scheme’ in an ofﬁcial and institutionalized way,
whereas circuses were only able to offer an unofﬁcial and haphazard access
to these sights. Robert W. Jones, ‘ “The Sight of Creatures Strange to Our
Clime”: London Zoo and the Consumption of the Exotic’, Journal of
Victorian Culture (1997), 1–25, at 5.

16. William Hazlitt, ‘The Indian Jugglers’ [1825] in Jon Cook, ed., William

Hazlitt: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 128–45.

17. Ibid., p. 128. Subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the

text.

18. John Whale, ‘Indian Jugglers: Hazlitt, Romantic Orientalism and the Differ-

ence of View’ in Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, eds, Colonialism, Writing
and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
pp. 206–20, at p. 211.

19. Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: the Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2000). See also, Alison Winter, Mesmerised: Powers of
Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press,
1998).

20. See Pick, Svengali’s Web, pp. 1–43.
21. George du Maurier, Trilby ([1894] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
22. Bram Stoker, Dracula ([1897] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). All sub-

sequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text. See also
Judith Halberstam’s detailed exploration of the anti-semitic resonances (par-
ticularly in the details of physiogomy) of Stoker’s text in Skin Shows: the
Making of Monstrosity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 91–101.

23. Montague Summers, The Vampire in Europe ([1929] London: Bracken, 1996).
24. Daniel Pick, Svengali Web, p. 164. Above all, it was believed that the Jews

possessed special powers of psychic manipulation and also of demonic po-
tential: an association which had been repeatedly articulated by those who
were distrustful of Benjamin Disraeli in the 1870s. See ibid., pp. 129–31.

25. Ibid., p. 165.
26. Pick quotes from Jung whose critiques of (especially Freud’s) psychoanalytic

practice were speciﬁcally based on his belief that it ‘had an especially per-
nicious effect on gentile minds’ because it was a ‘system of thought stem-
ming from innately Jewish propensities and peculiarities, and could not be
generalized, or at least only through a kind of dogmatic imposition’. Ibid.,
p. 162.

27. William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (New York: William Heinemann,

1947). All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text.

28. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London: Cassell, 1981), p. 327.

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29. Lady Eleanor F. Smith, Satan’s Circus and other Stories (London: Victor

Gollancz, 1932). All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given
in the text.

30. For further discussion of the use of settings in these ﬁlms see Peter

Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1993).

31. The two key females in the narrative are called Dora and Anna: the ﬁrst is

the doctor’s daughter, the second is the school teacher’s wife. It is hard to
resist reading this as a Freudian reference and indeed joke on the script-
writer’s part since Mitterhaus the vampire makes his way to these two pro-
fessional men through the women connected to them, both of whom are
vulnerable because of their unfulﬁlled sexual desires. Thus, Anna is to be the
beguiled victim of a hypnotizing, parasitic vampire.

32. Charles G. Finney, ‘The Circus of Dr. Lao’ in Ray Bradbury, ed., The Circus of

Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories (New York: Bantam Books, 1956),
pp. 1–77. All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the
text. A ﬁlm version of this story, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao was directed by George
Pal in 1963 and stars Tony Randall as Dr. Lao.

33. Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes ([1963] London: Bantam,

1977). The story was also ﬁlmed, with the same title, by Jack Clayton for
Disney ﬁlms in 1983.

34. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, p. 240.
35. Ibid.
36. The story goes on to pinpoint the contradictory nature of Apollonius’s action

in this scene, again under ‘Questions and Contradictions’: ‘Why should
Apollonius of Tyana, who claimed superiority to Christ, fall back on the cru-
ciﬁx to banish Satan?’ (p. 91).

37. For example, he discusses the ‘theater of effective Western knowledge about

the Orient’ (Edward W. Said, Orientalism, p. 43), and the ‘idea of represen-
tation itself’ is argued to be a ‘theatrical one’ in which ‘the Orient is the stage
on which the whole East is conﬁned’ (p. 63). See also ibid., pp. 67, 71, 79
and 185.

38. Edward W. Said, Culture and Orientalism ([1993] London: Chatto, 1994).
39. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London:

Verso, 1997), pp. 66–7 and 71.

40. Ibid., p. 56.

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Burning Down the Master’s
(Prison)-House: Revolution and
Revelation in Colonial and
Postcolonial Female Gothic

Carol Margaret Davison

136

When examined through Darwinian lenses as a type of literary species,
the Gothic genre may be described as tremendously adaptable. Indeed,
in the generic survival of the ﬁttest, the Gothic arguably leads the pack.
As John Paul Riquelme has recently claimed about this genre and
twentieth-century ﬁction, for example:

The transformations, adaptations, and other prominent traces of
the Gothic in modern writing indicate the persistence of a cluster of
cultural anxieties to which Gothic writing and literary modernism,
along with postcolonial writing and some popular forms of expres-
sion, continue to respond.

While my aim here, in part, involves identifying and interpreting the
persistent ‘cluster of cultural anxieties’ in several works of a subgenre
I am calling Empire Gothic ﬁction, isolating and assessing the permu-
tations of the persistent cluster of literary conventions and symbols
through which they are expressed is equally material. Foremost among
these is the haunted, contested castle that Montague Summers describes
as that genre’s foremost ‘character’.

This multi-faceted emblem under-

goes signiﬁcant renovations as the Gothic is increasingly secularized and
domesticated (i.e. ‘brought home’ to England) in the course of the nine-
teenth century. The noteworthy shift from ‘foreign’ Roman Catholic
settings to more familiar domestic backdrops is, however, somewhat
deceptive as a cultural gauge of changing national preoccupations.
While the Gothic may rear its head in the drawing rooms of London

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and Bath in the early to mid-nineteenth century, it by no means
becomes exclusively domestic in its focus. In fact, in several note-
worthy instances, domestic Gothic works of this era foreground the
interconnectedness of home and empire, thus ‘suggest[ing] something
of the enormous inﬂuence the question of empire had on British
culture’.

In such ostensibly ‘domestic’ Victorian works as Charlotte

Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
(1860–1), for example, the spectre of empire occasionally looms large.
In these Gothic-inﬂected classics, economic anxieties regarding a prin-
cipal source of British wealth are distilled into dramatic ‘return of the
repressed’ episodes featuring such ‘invading’ and uncanny colonial
ﬁgures as Bertha Mason and Abel Magwitch. As such, these works sow
the seeds for two subsequent, related developments – the Imperial
Gothic of the ﬁn de siècle, which taps anxieties about the degeneration
of British institutions, the threat of going native, and the invasion of
Britain by demonic colonial forces, and the postcolonial Gothic of the
late twentieth century, which features the re-animated traumas of a
nation’s colonial past.

Given their preoccupation with imperialism and

its impact domestically and abroad, all of these generic developments
may be classiﬁed under the rubric ‘Empire Gothic’.

Central to the Empire Gothic’s narrative treatment of the complex,

often vexed relationship between home and empire is the contested,
haunted manor house. This hybrid of Walpole’s imaginary cosmic castle
and the historic English country house speaks, like its forebears, to issues
of material and spiritual inheritance.

Like the country house, an

‘institution representing the structure and tradition of English society’,
stability and custom are among its paramount features.

Despite its loca-

tion (on domestic or foreign soil) or classiﬁcation (manor house,
country house, Great House or colonial estate), it is usually bolstered by
colonial wealth and functions as a prominent signpost of the British
‘civilizing mission’ and its attendant patriarchal power and authority.

As Anne McClintock astutely explains in her book Imperial Leather:
Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, this ostensibly exclu-
sive domestic site veils the more aggressive aims and multifarious
dimensions of that mission:

Etymologically, the verb to domesticate is akin to dominate, which
derives from dominus, lord of the domum, the home. Until 1964,
however, the verb to domesticate also carried as one of its meanings
the action ‘to civilize.’ In the colonies . . . the mission station became
a threshold institution for transforming domesticity rooted in

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European gender and class roles into domesticity as controlling a col-
onized people.

The manor/Great House in Gothic ﬁction functions as a similar ‘thresh-
old institution’ for, in its domesticating/civilizing enterprise, it yokes
private and public sphere agendas and concerns. Further, it functions
as a mixed gendered site – a ‘female space, . . . literally the proper “place”
for women, . . . [which is] simultaneously . . . the site for the reproduc-
tion of the patriarchal family’.

The Empire Gothic’s manor/Great House

may also be described, to borrow from the work of Mary Louise Pratt
on imperial travel-writing, as a fertile ‘contact zone’ between home and
empire where ‘disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each
other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and sub-
ordination’.

As such, and in keeping with traditional Gothic conven-

tions and plot dynamics, the manor/Great House is a site of historical
and cultural, conscious and unconscious, collisions and collusions.
There, the repressed sins of the fathers return, spawning uncanny
encounters between past and present, and various manifestations of
the foreign/imperial and familiar/domestic, or what Homi K. Bhabha
describes as ‘the heimlich pleasures of the hearth, [and] the unheimlich
terror of the space or race of the Other’.

Symbolic purifying revolu-

tions frequently result which reduce the manor/Great House to ruins.

In this narrative dynamic of revelation, indictment and puriﬁcation,

the empire Gothic’s closest generic relative is perhaps the Female Gothic
which, on the basis of established gender ideology, advances, to varying
degrees, a critique of enlightened paternalism. Indeed, the two genres
of Empire Gothic and Female Gothic were probably ﬁrst combined in
Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the text that constitutes my principal focus here. By
way of Edward Rochester’s estate of Thornﬁeld Hall, the Ur-manor/Great
House in the Empire Gothic tradition, which is tenanted by Rochester’s
mad Jamaican Creole wife Bertha Mason, Brontë’s deceptively simple
novel explores the often related ideologies, as McClintock reminds us,
of domesticity and imperialism. To date, the most common interpretive
problem plaguing Jane Eyre has been the tendency to misread the rela-
tionship Brontë establishes between the text’s domestic and imperial
aspects. In this regard, it is signiﬁcant to note that Jane Eyre’s critical
reception in the past few decades has not only been fought, principally,
on the frontiers of feminism and postcolonialism, but has, with the rare
exception, involved a face-off between feminists and postcolonialists.
Although initially heralded in the 1970s by such critics as Sandra Gilbert
and Susan Gubar as a prototypical female Bildungsroman promoting

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female autonomy and self-determination, this ‘cult text of feminism’
was thereafter denounced in the 1980s, beginning with Gayatri Spivak,
for reproducing ‘the axioms of imperialism’.

Feminists and postcolonialists have failed, however, to see the ‘big

picture’ that is Jane Eyre. While heavy-handed agendas have been the
cause of most instances of interpretive myopia, another has been the
failure to bring issues of genre, especially relating to the Gothic, to bear
on the imperial dimension of Brontë’s narrative strategies. Although
most of the generic examinations of Jane Eyre focus on the Gothic,
Gothicists have fared equally poorly in their critical assessments as they
have tended to focus on Jane Eyre’s Female Gothic component at the
expense of its Empire Gothic aspect.

Although Victorianists such as

Deirdre David and Susan Meyer did much in the 1990s to bring the
domestic and imperial threads of this intricately woven novel together
– a work that David astutely characterizes as possessing a ‘romantic plot
imbricated by empire’ – they failed to recognize that Brontë’s calculated
and inventive tropological and narrative strategies in what is undeni-
ably a cryptic symbolic economy are fundamentally indebted to the
Gothic.

Q.D. Leavis’s nutshell sketch of Brontë’s signature style from

the 1966 Penguin edition of Jane Eyre still serves as a valuable decoding
guide. As Leavis so articulately describes it,

A good deal of the effect of the book depends on the reader’s making
out associations, and the parts are not mechanically linked by a plot
as in most previous ﬁctions but organically united (as in Shakespeare)
by imagery and symbolism which pervade the novel and are as much
part of the narrative as the action.

Extrapolating on Leavis’s insights, it should be noted that consideration
of the generic provenance of much of the novel’s imagery and symbol-
ism and of its narrative dynamics and conventions is also key to a more
complete interpretation.

The present essay urges a return to Thornﬁeld’s haunted halls in order

to promote the recognition and articulation of Jane Eyre’s role as a rich
cultural matrix of both the Empire and Female Gothic traditions. Along-
side an examination of its generic inheritance, consideration should be
given to this text’s ideologically loaded theme of inheritance, for it
yokes home and empire along moral and economic lines. With a
critical lens focused on the Empire Gothic’s manor/Great House, an
in-depth examination will be undertaken of Jane Eyre’s major tropolog-
ical strategies and their ideological implications. While, as Sara Suleri

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has claimed, ‘the tropologies of gender . . . obsess the literatures of impe-
rialism’, the tropologies of imperialism also frequently obsess the liter-
atures of gender.

In fact, recent scholarship has isolated a topos of

‘feminism in imperialism’ in ‘key nineteenth-century novels’ where
‘a vocabulary and imagery of oppressed oriental womanhood’ is
deployed.

In the light of Brontë’s manipulation of this tropological tradition and

other narrative and symbolic strategies, the transmutations of the
Empire/Female Gothic and its capital sign, the manor/Great House, will
be brieﬂy examined, in its foremost postcolonial ‘offspring’ that may be
said to be consciously and unconsciously ‘haunted’ by Jane Eyre – Jean
Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), an intended ‘prequel’ that both clari-
ﬁes and distorts its ‘mother text’. In its investigation of the location and
make-up of colonial and postcolonial epistemological terror, this essay
participates in the ongoing Gothic-related project urged by Terry Castle
in The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention
of the Uncanny of historicizing the uncanny. Further to this and in the
light of recent postcolonial debates, two complementary cautions
regarding the popular tendencies of postcolonial criticism will be kept
ﬁrmly in mind – Sara Suleri’s perceptive reminder that ‘the concept of
the postcolonial itself is too frequently robbed of historical speciﬁcity’
and Bruce Robbins’s observation that the empire is generally conceived
in a nebulous and reductive manner as ‘the “unconscious” of 19

century culture’.

About half-way through Jane Eyre, following Grace Poole’s ostensible
attack on Roger Mason, Jane is plagued with questions regarding her
master’s house, Thornﬁeld Hall. ‘What crime was this’, she wonders
while tending to Mason’s wounds, ‘that lived incarnate in this
sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor subdued by the
owner? What mystery, that broke out, now in ﬁre and now in blood, at
the deadest hours of night?’.

Similar concerns had earlier obsessed this

perpetual questioner (pp. 39, 109). In reaction to Mrs Fairfax’s comment
that Rochester shuns Thornﬁeld (p. 159), Jane wrangles with the conun-
drum, ‘What alienates him from the house?’ (p. 178). The subsequent
exposure of Bertha’s imprisonment on the third ﬂoor and of Rochester’s
story regarding his ‘capital error’ (p. 247) of being deceived by his ‘avari-
cious, grasping’ (p. 332) father into marrying, unbeknownst to him, a
wealthy yet ‘intemperate and unchaste’ woman genetically predisposed
to madness (p. 334), securely establishes Thornﬁeld’s role as an exem-

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plary Gothic manor house: it is, like its owner, accursed and character-
ized by secrecy.

Possessed of ‘the aspect of a home of the past – a shrine of memory’

(p. 137), Thornﬁeld Hall is haunted by the sins of the fathers that are,
in part, domestic and associated with the mistreatment of women.
‘Vault-like’ (p. 129) and a ‘mere dungeon’ (p. 244), Thornﬁeld is the
literal asylum of its master’s wife, a type of ‘Bluebeard’s castle’ (p. 138).
As such, it entirely undermines John Ruskin’s portrait of the ideal
Victorian home as ‘the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all
injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division’.

In Rochester’s family

estate, the ‘more intangible prison of female propriety’ that tyrannized
women’s lives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is literalized.

In keeping with the established Female Gothic tradition that focuses on
‘women who just can’t seem to get out of the house’, the passionate,
enraged-yet-conﬁned Bertha Rochester raises the spectre of a loveless,
lust-driven marriage transacted as a form of commercial exchange that,
effectively, imprisons and enslaves the wife.

Albeit in an exaggerated

form, Bertha represents the married Victorian woman whose autonomy
and identity were denied as she became a femme couverte under the law.

In terms of her signiﬁcance to the domestic aspect of Jane’s psy-

chomachia, Bertha’s role is fairly clear: she functions as a monitory
ﬁgure who taps deep-seated fears relating to what Brontë’s cautious little
elﬁn governess refers to as the ‘catastrophe’ of marriage (p. 228). As
Rochester’s confessional story testiﬁes, such a catastrophe is more likely
to occur when passion outweighs reason and, in a new spin on the
Female Gothic, it is demonstrated also to affect men negatively. These
disasters must be avoided if Jane is to be rewarded with a companion-
ate marriage and family fortune at journey’s end. Thus, following in the
footsteps of such foremothers as Emily St Aubert and Ellena Rosalba,
Jane Eyre, the governess, must learn self-governance and gain fortitude
during her pilgrim’s progress. Bertha’s brutal and dramatic death two
months after Jane’s departure from the Hall (p. 452) not only literalizes
the femme couverte’s death-in-marriage situation, it marks the removal
of the major material impediment to Jane’s marriage to Rochester.
Further, it symbolically signals, according to feminists of various stripes,
the temperance of Jane’s ‘hunger, rebellion, and rage’, and of the
passion that binds her to Rochester, a passion strong enough to make
him an icon that, temporarily at least, spiritually blinds her.

In this

instance, Thornﬁeld is ‘a would-be whore/horror house’ of temptation
wherein Bertha functions as ‘Jane’s dark double’, the embodiment and

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expression of the governess’s generally repressed passion which could, if
unleashed, prompt her to become Rochester’s mistress.

That Bertha’s

initial incarceration almost exactly coincides, historically, with the
rebellious younger Jane’s conﬁnement in the red-room at Gateshead
Hall further forges the Jane–Bertha bond.

In terms of Jane Eyre’s tropological structure, imperialist tropes are

repeatedly brought to bear on its central preoccupation, the Woman
Question, an extremely prominent issue in the 1840s. Indeed, images
of the Empire/Orient are evoked almost exclusively in Jane Eyre in rela-
tion to gender issues. The Empire is a site of female oppression where
women are exchanged, collected and displayed like commodities, only
to be ‘grilled alive’ (p. 441) in a ritualistic sati when deemed to be no
longer useful. Perhaps foremost among the novel’s Empire/Orient
images, however, is that of marriage as a form of slavery or ‘peculiar
institution’, a popular equation forged by women writers before and
during Brontë’s period.

As Joyce Zonana writes, these ‘feminist writers

learned to approach issues of sexuality by putting them in oriental
terms. Prostitution, the marriage market, and the habit of keeping mis-
tresses . . . [were] ﬁgured as Eastern intrusions into a Western ideal of
monogamous romantic love and marriage’.

In the light of this and

Jane’s pursuit of the companionate, egalitarian marriage ideal, she must
be ritually puriﬁed of her ‘Inner Bertha’, the impassioned and decidedly
unchristian ‘revolted slave’ (p. 46) with whom she is semiotically asso-
ciated after her dispute with John Reed.

With the rare exception, critics have regarded Brontë’s imperialist

tropes as quite speciﬁcally limited in their application to the Woman
Question. This limitation has been the main source of Jane Eyre’s dis-
paragement among postcolonial feminists. In this regard, although
Audre Lorde’s comments in her essay, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never
Dismantle the Master’s House’, are not addressed to Jane Eyre, they
apply. Lorde writes, ‘Poor women and women of Color know there is a
difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and
prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42

Street’.

Drawing

on the implications of Lorde’s statement, a signiﬁcant distinction exists
between marital slavery and slavery, a distinction that postcolonial
feminists claim Brontë totally elides. As they see it, in fact, Brontë is
entirely unconcerned with the issue of slavery. In the words of Penny
Boumelha:

There are . . . ten explicit references to slavery in Jane Eyre. They
allude to slavery in Ancient Rome and in the seraglio, to the slaver-

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ies of paid work as governess and of dependence as a mistress. None
of them refers to the slave trade upon which the fortunes of all in
the novel are based. Quakers, of course, had been among the ﬁrst
and prominent opponents of English slavery, but Jane’s own
Quakerishness, so often commented upon, leads her only as far as a
stern opposition to distant or metaphorical forms of enslavement.

Arguing that restricting Brontë’s political critique to the oppression of
middle-class women is to play things critically safe, Deirdre David
advances another somewhat similar take on Brontë’s tropological
strategy in Jane Eyre.

In David’s opinion, Jane is ‘a symbolic governess

of Empire’ who promotes maintaining ‘high moral standards in the
governance of that Empire’ at ‘a speciﬁc historical moment when
women were called upon to be agents in the labor of both renovating
and expanding Britannic rule’.

Thus are the novel’s domestic tropes at

the service of its imperial theme according to David. Like other post-
colonial feminists, she maintains that Brontë condones rather than
challenges the patriarchal status quo.

Flying in the face of established criticism, I would maintain that

Brontë is entirely cognizant of the crucial difference between marital
slavery and slavery, and that she advances a joint critique of both in
Jane Eyre. Contrary to David’s claim, Jane decidedly rejects St John’s offer
to accompany him as a missionary to India where, in her words, he will
enter ‘his wild ﬁeld of mission warfare’ (p. 394). As this phraseology
implies, Jane is fairly critical of the imperialist enterprise. Indeed, as
Michael Wheeler persuasively argues, Brontë satirizes St John’s mission:
‘. . . Jane Eyre ﬁnds her own interpretation of Christianity through rebel-
lion against the extreme position of those who try to dominate her’.

St John’s harsh Calvinism promotes judgement without mercy (p. 378),
a combination she suggests is unChristian when she later describes God
as having ‘tempered judgement with mercy’ in Rochester’s case at the
novel’s end (p. 477). In Jane’s opinion, St John has yet to discover, at
the point where she encounters him at Moor House, ‘the peace of God
which passeth all understanding’ (p. 378).

Further, Brontë suggests that ‘civilization’ is, to some degree,

grounded in barbarism. An imperial ‘crime’ also haunts Thornﬁeld Hall.
Given the cultural make-up of its inhabitants and the origins of its
prominently featured ﬁnancial ‘blood supply’, Jane Eyre puts a decidedly
colonial spin on the ‘sins of the fathers’ recipe. Like so many other
novels in the Victorian canon, it ‘turns upon questions of inheritance’.

With one crucial exception, Jane Eyre’s various inheritances, all diverted

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and denied yet restored by novel’s end, are conspicuously associated
with Jamaica. According to Boumelha, Bertha represents ‘not only mad-
woman in the attic, after all, but also skeleton in the closet, the “dark”
secret, the maddening burden of imperialism concealed in the heart of
every English gentleman’s house of the time’.

Imperialism, however,

does not appear to be indicted as a whole. Instead, in the tradition of
the Godwinian Gothic, which denounces Britain’s propensity towards
certain unethical economic practices, Jane Eyre condemns Britain’s
engagement with an unarguably barbaric trade, namely slavery.

The ambiguity around Bertha’s race and her act of ultimately destroy-

ing Thornﬁeld by conﬂagration link her, as Susan Meyer perceptively
comments, with the Jamaican Maroons.

These black anti-slavery rebels

ﬁrst emerged in the seventeenth century during Cromwell’s attack on
the Spaniards in Jamaica.

Their cause garnered further support from

French Revolutionary principles at the end of the eighteenth. Gaining
their name from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning ‘wild’ or
‘untamed’, these former slaves sometimes had female leaders and lived
in Jamaica’s wild mountain country. In retaliation against the British
and with the aim of enlarging their community, they often swept down
on the colonialists at night, setting ﬁre to the ﬁelds, and stealing cattle
and other livestock.

Thus, Brontë’s ﬁre-bearing Bertha enacts ‘precisely

the sort of revolt feared by the British colonists in Jamaica’.

The cun-

ningly labelled ‘great plague house’ of Thornﬁeld Hall (p. 173) is thus
transformed, despite its geographical location, into a plagued Great
House. Figuratively sustained by colonial blood transfusions in the form
of Bertha’s £30,000 dowry, it is possessed and maintained by a violent
‘race’ (p. 137) who carry what is suggested is a ‘ﬁlthy burden’ (p. 336)
of sin with their involvement in the slave trade. As with Brontë’s indict-
ment of non-companionate materially driven marriage, the colonial
trade in human ﬂesh is condemned as a grotesque, anti-Christian prac-
tice. In forging this parallel, Brontë adopts a common strategy in Wilber-
forcean writing during the Abolition and Emancipation decades when
slavery debates were extended into the discourse surrounding ‘domes-
tic issues relating to labour and social conditions, especially of women
and children’.

She also weighs in on an issue vital to the economic

well-being of a number of families in her immediate neighbourhood of
Cowan Bridge (p. 184).

While Jane possesses a certain compassion for Bertha – she deems

Rochester’s treatment of her ‘inexorable’, ‘vindictive’ and ‘cruel’ (p. 317)
– Brontë’s categorically Protestant novel promotes a Reformation (asso-
ciated with Jane) as opposed to a Revolution (associated with Bertha),

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the latter movement being traditionally identiﬁed in Britain, and espe-
cially in Gothic ﬁction, with irrationality and with France. Indeed, refor-
mation, something of which Rochester claims he is yet capable (p. 167),
is the order of the day in Jane Eyre. It yokes the novel’s two predomi-
nant tropological threads as a reformation in British imperial practices
is advocated alongside a reformation of the existing marriage institu-
tion. It is not true to say, therefore, that ‘the novel represses the history
of British colonial oppression and, in particular, British enslavement of
Africans, by marking all aspects of oppression “other” – non-British,
non-white, the result of a besmirching contact with “dark races” ’.

classic Gothic fashion, the long-repressed Bertha expresses, in her delib-
erate conﬂagration of Thornﬁeld, the sins of the fathers being visited
upon the sons. It is more than simply possible, therefore, ‘to see the
“ruin” of Rochester as the “ruin” of colonial practices’; however, the
‘crime’ that plagues Thornﬁeld is not, as David argues, the ‘invasion
into West Indian society by a greedy gentry class in search of proﬁtable
marriage’.

While this is an error, one that Rochester readily concedes

is his, it is not, as he emphasizes, a crime such as might involve the
‘shedding of blood or any other guilty act, which might make the per-
petrator amenable to the law’ (p. 247).

The crime that haunts Thornﬁeld Hall is slavery. Thus, Jane’s prim

black Quaker dress (pp. 130, 160) is not simply a fashion statement or
a sartorial sign indicative of her plainness and honest plainspokenness.
Its symbolism extends beyond her proto-feminist role as a crusader
against marital slavery. In what is truly, as Gilbert and Gubar argue, a
palimpsestic narrative ‘whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper,
less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning’ (p. 73),
Jane and her ‘dark double’ Bertha are, on one level at least, sisters in
arms. The monster, Bertha, fulﬁls her symbolic monitory function as a
crusader against continued involvement with the slave trade. Jane
rejects the role of missionary to India in order to embrace, in true
Scheherazade style, the role of native missionary to a jaded and untrust-
ing husband who is ironically and symbolically self-described as ‘hard
and tough as an indiarubber ball’. Jane’s mission involves converting
him back to emotional, loving, human ﬂesh (p. 163) and so purify
Thornﬁeld of colonial ‘contamination’ (p. 334). In this regard, as Meyer
cogently contends, Brontë manipulates a prevalent motif that derives
from middle-class domestic ideology, that of ‘keeping a clean house’.

Jane Eyre’s historical backdrop and narrative strategy regarding other

contentious political issues are also vital in the establishment of Brontë’s
moralizing message. In comparison with her sister Emily’s Wuthering

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Heights, a text obsessively exact in its attention to details of historical
chronology, Jane Eyre has long been faulted for its apparently nebulous
historical setting and anachronisms. Q.D. Leavis, for example, confesses
to total incomprehension with regard to Brontë’s rationale in backdat-
ing her novel, and issues the scathing observation that the ‘general con-
fusion of dates and eras and fashions and facts [in Jane Eyre] is even
more irrational than Dickens allowed himself’.

In support of this

claim, Leavis notes that Rochester essentially ‘plagiarizes’ Lord Byron’s
Childe Harold, a work published in 1814, when he relates the account
of his travels throughout Europe in the late eighteenth century.

Such

a reference, however, does not damage the historical accuracy of Jane
Eyre’s setting as it is not alluded to as a published text in the course of
Rochester’s account.

A direct literary reference is provided, however, in another instance

where it furnishes the only indication, in an otherwise ‘timeless’ text,
of Jane Eyre’s precise historical backdrop. Jane’s allusion, while yet at
Moor House, to the ‘new publication’ (p. 396) of Sir Walter Scott’s 1808
poem Marmion, informs the reader that Jane Eyre chronicles the period
1798–1818, the last ten-year period of which (1808–18) is only brieﬂy
mentioned in the novel’s closing chapter (p. 475). Given these dates,
Brontë appears to be true to form as a superb architect of symbolic struc-
ture. In terms of its imperial activities, Britain was undergoing a note-
worthy reformation during this period, one that involved the peculiar
institution of slavery. While Denmark abolished the slave trade in 1803,
Britain followed suit in 1807.

The abolition of slavery as a whole in

Britain and its colonies was to follow in 1833. Given these dates, Bertha
burns down Thornﬁeld at a signiﬁcant moment, namely on the heels
of the abolition of the slave trade. Indeed, it may be argued that her
destructive act signals an overdue end to that trafﬁc, an act that Brontë,
taking poetic licence, extends by way of tropological resonances to the
marriage institution of the 1840s which she perceives as promoting a
similar ‘trafﬁc’ in women. This strategy of veiled political allusion is
consistent in Jane Eyre. Lending support to Gilbert and Gubar’s claims
regarding the palimpsestic nature of many nineteenth-century women’s
novels, Elsie Michie has perhaps best illuminated the deeper, more polit-
ically subversive nature of Brontë’s novel.

She unearths the oblique

but undeniable references to the potato famine during Jane’s experi-
ences at Lowood (p. 78), and to Chartism when Jane fervently discusses
female rights with Rochester (p. 298).

On this front, the signiﬁcance of the provenance of Jane’s familial

inheritance, derived from her uncle’s successes as a Madeira wine

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merchant, has yet to be noted. While Jane’s distribution of her £20,000
among her cousins has been interpreted as signalling an end to the sins
of her forefathers, the implication of its source has remained over-
looked. The island of Madeira was under British rule between 1807 and
1814. Thus, Jane receives her inheritance in 1808 after the slave trade’s
abolition. In the light of these facts, Jane Eyre is a successful attack on
‘the acceptance of inequities on earth’, the main theme of The Pilgrim’s
Progress.

Brontë’s novel not only gestures, in its ﬁnal moments, toward

a future heaven on earth in both Jane’s union with Rochester and by
way of the Second Coming (p. 477), it anticipates a revolutionary secular
apocalypse – albeit linked with what some may consider a problematic
vision of a guiding, enlightened Christianity – involving greater equity
and treatment for women and all inhabitants of the British Empire.

In terms of literary history, Jane Eyre has cast a long shadow. Beyond its
countless Bildungsroman-grounded offspring, its Gothic progeny include
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ – a text haunted by
Bertha Mason – and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

In terms of its Post-

colonial Gothic successors, Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain is one of
many works marked by its inﬂuence. Perhaps Jane Eyre’s most renowned
and controversial descendant in this domain, however, is Jean Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea, an imagined prequel written to vindicate Bertha
Rochester and to counter what Rhys considered to be Brontë’s anti-
Caribbean standpoint.

Set shortly after the passing of the 1833 Eman-

cipation Act, Wide Sargasso Sea is a Female Gothic narrative gone
nightmarishly wrong, as the Gothic vision of domesticity is realized as
opposed to avoided. The novel’s ﬁrst section, recounting the tormented,
insecure childhood of Bertha, née Antoinette Mason, in Jamaica, follows
a fairly traditional Female Gothic plot recounting the childhood calami-
ties and nightmares of its protagonist. Antoinette’s experience in a
convent, an ambivalent temporary refuge of ‘sunshine and death’ where
she is nurtured in the ﬁne art of self-repression and fed with the roman-
tic tales of beautiful and wealthy female saints ‘loved by rich and hand-
some young men’, is also related.

This opening sequence comes to a

horriﬁc climax in the second section chronicling her honeymoon in the
ominously named area of Massacre, and her merciless post-marital
battle with Rochester. Related largely through his eyes, this narrative
component is traditional Imperial Gothic writ large: as Rochester
confronts a territory gendered as female and characterized by secrecy
and excess, he wrestles with his own psychic demons, the ominous
possibility of ‘going native’, and the recognition, urged by terrifying

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experiences with an excessive wife who is in many respects his double,
that civilization is an eternally threatened cultural construct grounded
in barbarism. The brief third section, set in England, dovetails with Jane
Eyre and concludes as the displaced, disoriented Antoinette, identifying
with the former slaves who incinerated her childhood home, prepares
to set ﬁre to Thornﬁeld Hall.

As Spivak has convincingly illustrated, ‘feminism and a critique of

imperialism become complicit’ in Wide Sargasso Sea.

In this respect,

Rhys’s revisionary narrative functions as a ‘double’ text to Jane Eyre. It
also consciously mirrors and reconﬁgures many of Brontë’s narrative
and symbolic elements, especially its ﬁre imagery. Concerned with the
‘identifying relationship between self and place’, and marked by a char-
acteristic ‘post-colonial crisis of identity’, Wide Sargasso Sea puts a decid-
edly postcolonial and postmodern spin on Jane Eyre as it repeatedly
‘dismantle[s] assumptions about language and textuality and . . .
stress[es] the importance of ideological construction in social-textual
relations’.

Indeed, Rhys’s most innovative and provocative insights

focus on the relative nature of terror, and the role of language in the
creation and maintenance of patriarchal power. The empire, Wide Sar-
gasso Sea suggests, is partly a ﬁction as is ‘the self/Other division
imposed by imperialism’.

In the light of these insights, Rhys places in

the foreground the importance of perspective and both presents and
subverts the process of imperial othering. Her visualization of the West
Indies ‘in all its socio-cultural complexity, and not merely as an “oth-
erness machine” ’ is soberingly realistic, particularly with regard to its
treatment of hybrid ethnic and/or class identity.

Antoinette’s desper-

ate lack of personal and national identity as a Creole is a result, in part,
of a tyrannical history that valorized purity. In the view of Caribbean
novelist Wilson Harris, postcolonial hybridity ‘is constantly struggling
to free itself from a past which stressed ancestry, and which valued the
“pure” over its threatening opposite, the “composite” ’.

Antoinette and

Rochester, in his union with her, are essentially haunted by the night-
mares of history – familial ghosts and those of British imperial history
(p. 137). While Rochester may ultimately be accommodated by denying
Antoinette, she is not so fortunate.

Rhys’s complex social perspective also undermines, particularly with

regard to the concept of justice, the moral and epistemological certain-
ties of Jane Eyre. It is, rather notably, ‘Bertha’, a character grotesquely
wronged and silenced in Brontë’s novel, who disputes Rochester’s claim
that slavery was a question of justice and asserts that there is, in fact,
no such thing as justice (p. 137). Likewise, it is ‘Bertha’ who articulates

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the nature of Rhys’s revisionary enterprise when she tells her com-
bative husband that ‘[t]here is always another side to every story’
(p. 128). In fact, she discovers that some stories are, tragically, never
told, such as that of the 14-year-old St Innocenzia whose skeleton is
buried under the convent chapel’s altar (p. 53).

As regards the role of language in creating and maintaining patriar-

chal power, it is the oppressed in Wide Sargasso Sea who recognize and
articulate the nature of patriarchal strategy. Christophine, a former slave
from Martinique given as a gift to Antoinette’s mother on her wedding
day, says of her alleged freedom:

No more slavery! She had to laugh! ‘These new ones have Letter of
the Law. Same thing. They got magistrate. They got ﬁne. They got
jail house and chain gang. They got tread machine to mash up
people’s feet. New ones worse than old ones – more cunning, that’s
all.’ (pp. 21, 26)

By way of what Christophine describes as a demonically new-and-
improved form of patriarchy, the sins of the fathers are repeated by the
sons. Slavery, as Christophine sees it, is not eradicated from the im-
perialist formula but merely institutionalized. The same holds true, she
suggests, with marital ‘slavery’. When Antoinette rejects Christophine’s
advice to leave Rochester, Christophine’s remark that ‘All women, all
colours, nothing but fools’ (p. 109) implies that women have internal-
ized their subservient role and oppressed condition. Rhys underlines,
however, that the letter of the law also remains a vital component of
women’s oppression. Prior to Antoinette’s marriage, her Aunt Cora
unsuccessfully implores Antoinette’s brother Richard to arrange a legal
settlement which will ensure Antoinette’s legal protection (p. 114).
Antoinette’s later attack on him with a knife when he visits her in
England and informs her that he cannot legally interfere between
her and her husband provides evidence that this apparently mad wife
perceives a connection between the letter of the law and her domestic
imprisonment (p. 184).

The idea of relative cultural perspectives hovers over Wide Sargasso Sea

and is explicitly addressed in a conversation where Antoinette and
Rochester confess that they view each other’s homeland as ‘a cold dark
dream’ (p. 80). Nowhere is this concept of relativity more in evidence,
however, than in the characters’ reactions to various manor/Great
Houses – domestic spaces modelled on the various similarly ambivalent
and haunted ‘asylums’ in Jane Eyre. Secure for some and insecure for

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others, these sites, like Mr Luttrell’s slave estate that opens Wide Sargasso
Sea, embody the will to civilize and the legacy of a barbaric history.
Abandoned when Luttrell grows tired of awaiting compensation after
the passing of the Emancipation Act and drowns himself, his house is
believed by the black islanders to be haunted (pp. 17, 18). Antoinette’s
dilapidated childhood home of Coulibri Estate, with its overgrown, wild
garden, is also dreaded, and she later reveals that she was even fearful
there after sunset (pp. 19, 32). The home of a plantation-owning family
‘marooned’ by the Mother Country, Coulibri is subsequently burned to
the ground by ﬁgurative Maroons (pp. 18, 26). This fate is both sym-
bolically and morally appropriate as the sins of the ‘Mother Country’
are visited on her children, a dynamic that is also allegorically played
out in the relationship between Antoinette and her negligent mother
(pp. 38–45).

Rochester’s Imperial Gothic adventure, sandwiched between

Antoinette’s two Female Gothic narrative sequences, also features the
‘sins of the fathers’ dynamic. In a manor/Great House named Granbois,
Rochester, anticipating Jonathan Harker’s experiences in Transylvania
and Kurtz’s in Africa, wrestles with the ghosts of family history. In a
place whose history has been, notably, forgotten, Rochester confronts
repressed aspects of himself and his relationship with his father whom
he feels sold him off in a Faustian exchange for a beautiful, wealthy
woman (pp. 65–6, 70). Tragically and ironically, Rochester is increas-
ingly revealed to be his father’s son, a true son of the Empire, and a
Gothic husband as he beds a black servant girl and ﬁguratively murders
his wife by annihilating her voice and identity (p. 140). The threat of
powerlessness is especially bound up for Rochester with the image of a
feminized island whose wild and excessive vegetation jeopardizes civi-
lization. From Rochester’s perspective, Granbois, the awkward house on
stilts that emblematizes the British civilizing mission, seems to know it
cannot last (pp. 71–2). Antoinette’s stepfather, Mr Mason, also remarks
that the forest in Massacre threatens to ‘swallow up’ Granbois (p. 89).
Notably, Rochester’s hallucinogenic reading of this beautiful but deadly
dream/nightmare landscape is combined with his reading of his femme
fatale wife whom he believes changes at night (p. 92). Rochester
responds to his wife’s vulnerability with domination but comes to the
realization that he may never dominate the island. Like the nation that
will remain haunted, as Homi Bhabha eloquently argues, by a sense of
its transitory social reality, Granbois taunts and haunts Rochester with
the fact that his power is ephemeral and relative.

Looking back at ‘the

shabby white house’ as he departs from the ‘God-forsaken island’,

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Rochester observes:

More than ever before it [the house] strained away from the black
snake-like forest. Louder and more desperately it called: Save me from
destruction, ruin and desolation. Save me from the long slow death
by ants . . . Don’t you know that this is a dangerous place? And that
the dark forest always wins?

(p. 166)

Rochester’s return to England with a zombiﬁed, enslaved, and incar-
cerated wife who is renamed and transplanted after a reverse Middle
Passage, is, in his eyes, an act of survival and triumph that involves
extraordinary denial. The novel’s concluding sequence in Thornﬁeld,
however, presents Antoinette’s ultimate attainment of revenge and sym-
bolic freedom. In her eyes, Thornﬁeld is a colourless ‘cardboard house’
devoid of light, and not, as it is for her alcoholic guardian Grace Poole,
‘big and safe, a shelter from the world outside which, say what you like,
can be a black and cruel world to a woman’ (pp. 181, 178). Drawing
on the equation Brontë forges between the peculiar institution and
marriage, Rhys portrays Antoinette’s ﬁery ﬁnale as an act of resistance.
Having discovered logic and language to be at the service of patriarchy,
Antoinette creates another means of signifying that may be called
‘pyroglyphics’: she ﬁguratively writes ‘revenge’ in ﬁre as she incinerates
the master’s prison-house.

Notes

1. John Paul Riquelme, ‘Toward a History of Gothic and Modernism: Dark

Modernity from Bram Stoker to Samuel Beckett’, Modern Fiction Studies, 46
(2000), 585–605, at p. 589.

2. Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (London:

Fortune Press, 1938), pp. 410–11.

3. Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates

in Victorian Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. vii.

4. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,

1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 230; Ken
Gelder, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook to
Gothic Literature, (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998), pp. 180–1, at p. 181.

5. At least one critic, Richard Gill, has noted the connection between Gothic

ﬁction and the English country house. This singular location provided,
among other things, he says, ‘properties of horror to the Gothic romancer’:
see Richard Gill, Happy Rural Seat: the English Country House and the Literary
Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 6.

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6. Ibid., pp. 14, 16.
7. Given Ireland’s relationship to Britain, the tradition in Anglo-Irish literature

of the big house could also be included here. Notably, it too seems to have
developed out of the Gothic novel. Gill argues that this tradition was inﬂu-
enced by Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent from whence it descended to
such writers as Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, and Joyce Cary (ibid.,
p. 240).

8. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial

Context (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 35.

9. Paula E. Geyh, ‘Burning Down the House? Domestic Space and Feminine

Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping’, Contemporary Literature
34 (1993), 103–22, at 106.

10. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London

and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 6, 4.

11. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto ([1764] Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1982), p. 5; Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction’, in idem, ed., Nation and
Narration, ([1990] London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1–7, at p. 2.

12. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman

Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [1979] (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 339; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry 12
(1985), 243–61, at 244 and 243.

13. Although Gilbert and Gubar classify Jane Eyre, principally, as a variety of

female Bildungsroman, they also describe it as ‘moral gothic’ (The Madwoman
in the Attic, p. 337). Their in-depth reading of Bertha as Jane’s ‘dark double’
(ibid., p. 360) and their assessment of their relationship, which they argue
is ‘the book’s central confrontation’ (ibid., p. 339), illuminates much of Jane
Eyre’s Gothic nature.

14. Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire and Victorian Writing (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 84.

15. Q.D. Leavis, ‘Introduction’, to Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre [1847], ed.

Q.D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 13.

16. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago and London: University of

Chicago Press, 1992), p. 15.

17. Spivak, ‘Three Women’s texts’, p. 259; Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire:

the English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991), p. 81.

18. Sara Suleri, ‘Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition’

[1992] in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds, Colonial Discourse
and Postcolonial Theory: a Reader (Brighton: Harvester, 1994), pp. 244–56, at
p. 246; Bruce Robbins, ‘Colonial Discourse: a Paradigm and its Discontents’,
(a review of Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and
Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grifﬁths, and
Helen Tifﬁn, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice of Post-Colonial Lit-
eratures, Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, eds, Macropolitics of Nineteenth-
Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, Homi Bhabha, ed.,
Nation and Narration, and Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W.
Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature), Victorian Studies 35 (1992),
209–14, at 213.

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19. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre ([1847] Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 239,

emphasis added. Subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Refer-
ences will be given in parentheses in the text.

20. John Ruskin, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ [1871], in Harold Bloom, ed., The Liter-

ary Criticism of John Ruskin (New York: Da Capo Press, 1965), pp. 189–219,
at p. 194.

21. E.J. Clery, Women’s Gothic From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (Horndon:

Northcote House, 2000), p. 1.

22. Eugenia C. DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: a Feminist Study of Nineteenth-

Century Gothic (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 10.

23. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 339, 342.
24. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: the Rise of the Novel in America

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 222; Gilbert and Gubar, The Mad-
woman in the Attic, p. 360.

25. Mary Wollstonecraft repeatedly promotes this ‘woman as slave’ equation in

her 1792 publication, The Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft’s
description of female slavery, however, involves a certain volition on the
woman’s part. She argues that women submitted to slavery due to their
‘short-sighted desire’ to appeal to men: Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindication
of the Rights of Woman [1792], in Sylvana Tomaselli, ed., A Vindication of the
Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 65–294, at p. 116. In his otherwise
progressive 1825 work, Appeal of one Half the Human Race, Women, Against
the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, To Retain Them in Political, and Thence
in Civil and Domestic Slavery, William Thompson promotes this association
to an excessive and offensive degree when he deems white women more
enslaved than their black counterparts (London: Virago, 1983, p. 196).

26. Joyce Zonana, ‘The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Struc-

ture of Jane Eyre’, Signs 18 (1993), 592–617, at 604.

27. Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’

[1979], in Sister Outsider (Freedom, California: The Crossing Press, 1984),
pp. 110–13, at p. 112.

28. Penny Boumelha, ‘ “And What Do the Women Do?”: Jane Eyre, Jamaica and

the Gentleman’s House’, Southern Review 21 (1988) 111–22, at 113.

29. David, Rule Britannia, p. 96.
30. Ibid., pp. 80, 97.
31. Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the Victorian Period 1830–1890 (London

and New York: Longman, 1985), pp. 168, 169.

32. Boumelha, ‘ “And What Do the Women Do?” ’, 112.
33. Ibid.
34. See my chapter on William Godwin’s St Leon in my forthcoming book Anti-

Semitism and British Gothic Fiction (Palgrave). In my reading, Godwin por-
trays and indicts a socio-economic world view, one he fears is rapidly on the
rise, that he associates with Jews and thus promoting what he suggests is the
‘Judaization’ of Britain.

35. Susan Meyer, ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, in

Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, eds, Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century
Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 159–83.

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36. Meyer, ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, p. 164; Paul

Zach, ed., Jamaica (Hong Kong: Apa Productions, 1983), p. 33.

37. Zach, ed., Jamaica, p. 49.
38. Meyer, ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, p. 166.
39. Christopher Heywood, ‘Yorkshire Slavery in Wuthering Heights’, Review of

English Studies 38 (1987), 184–98, at 196.

40. Meyer, ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, p. 174.
41. David, Rule Britannia, pp. 83, 84.
42. Meyer, ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, p. 24.
43. Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Leavis, p. 488n.1.
44. Ibid., p. 489n.1.
45. Williams, From Columbus to Castro, p. 280.
46. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 73.
47. Elsie Michie, ‘From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff,

Rochester and Racial Difference’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 25 (1992), 125–40,
at 137, 138.

48. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 370.
49. Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Colum-

bia University Press, 1986), p. 201.

50. Jean Rhys, ‘Fated to be Sad’, Interview by Hannah Carter, Guardian, 8 August

1968, p. 5. Rhys’s feelings about Charlotte Brontë were, therefore, nothing
short of ambiguous. In a letter to her close friend Francis Wyndham in 1964,
Rhys declared her ‘very great and deep admiration for the Brontë sisters
([t]hough Charlotte did preachify sometimes)’: Jean Rhys Letters, 1931–1966,
ed. Diana Melly and Francis Wyndham (London: Deutsch, 1984), p. 271.

51. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea ([1966] New York and London: Norton, 1982),

pp. 56, 53. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. References
will be given in parentheses in the text.

52. Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, p. 251.
53. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grifﬁths, and Helen Tifﬁn, The Empire Writes Back:

Theory and Practice of Post-Colonial Literatures ([1989] London and New York:
Routledge, 1991), pp. 8–9, 165.

54. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, p. 169.
55. Carmen Wickramagamage, ‘An/other Side to Antoinette/Bertha: Reading

“Race” into Wide Sargasso Sea’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35 (2000),
27–42, at 39.

56. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, pp. 35–6.
57. Bhabha, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.

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Crossing Boundaries: the
Revision of Gothic Paradigms
in Heat and Dust

Mariaconcetta Costantini

155

The passage from traditional to twentieth-century Gothic is marked by
a combination of conservative and innovative elements. On one side,
contemporary tales of terror and persecution continue ‘to shadow the
progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside
of enlightenment and humanist values’. On the other side, they testify
to the development of a complex genre which challenges dominant dis-
courses ‘in diverse and ambiguous ways’.

If eighteenth-century writers

evoked the uncanny to question the utopianism of progressive ideals,
later practitioners have used Gothic paraphernalia to represent a wider
process of dispersion that affects ontological, existential and linguistic
categories alike.

The picture becomes more intricate if we consider some recent com-

binations of Gothic formulas with other genres. In postmodern ﬁction,
for instance, the horrors and the excesses of the unheimlich are extended
to the narrative level, so that the sense of displacement of modern life
is also conveyed by textual pastiche. This hybridizing process is directly
connected with the need to render the multiplication of meanings and
identities consequent on the dissolution of a monologic, highly struc-
tured view of reality. In other words, the interplay of forms and styles
implies that dominant ideologies are tested and weakened by the emer-
gence of otherness in a world in which boundaries are increasingly
blurred.

The idea of transgressing limits is the semantic pivot of contempo-

rary Gothic, which goes a step forward in questioning legitimated hier-
archies. In addition to displaying the ‘underside’ of the ofﬁcial world,
it heralds transition by depicting a heterogeneous counterworld, in
which the marginalized and the excluded clash and mingle with the
centres of power. Sexual, legal or psychological barriers are thus

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weakened by the materialization of a composite and multifarious reality,
while new social and existential questions come to the fore. Among
these latter, postcolonial issues of race and identity are of paramount
importance and deserve more critical attention.

The recent development of postcolonial studies has posed some

pressing hermeneutic problems. Confronted with the need to devise
appropriate critical methods, scholars have also coped with the difﬁ-
culty of interpreting the syncretic quality of the new phenomenon,
which blends with diverse narrative modes and ideologies – from post-
modern montage effects to magical realism, from horriﬁc representa-
tions of oppressive systems to open parody, from feminist vindications
to transgressive sexual issues. In particular, postcolonial ﬁction proves
fertile ground for Gothic plots and ﬁgures, which well exemplify the
tensions and the consequences of imperialistic relations. The result is
‘postcolonial Gothic’, a new genre (or sub-genre) that is still largely
unexplored. Apart from a few critical investigations, postcolonial schol-
ars have mainly privileged socio-political questions. Less attention has
been paid to Gothic narrations of the Empire or of post-Independence
realities, in which the ‘ghosts’ of colonial domination reappear in new
alarming shapes. But what are the reasons for such a theoretical
impasse?

First of all, we must take into account the ambiguity of the term ‘post-

colonialism’, which is a potential site for interpretative contestation.
Generally applied to the ‘new literatures’ initiated in the former
European colonies in the 1960s, it has also been used more widely to
denote a critical investigation of ‘the processes and effects of, and reac-
tions to, European colonialism from the sixteenth century up to and
including the neocolonialism of the present day’.

This latter deﬁnition

includes disparate narrative manifestations: from early stories of impe-
rial mysteries and anxieties, to later representations of neocolonial
threats, to the most recent supernatural-realist ﬁction produced by
native authors. We are thus faced with the problem of tracing similari-
ties between various ideological stances, of investigating how Gothic is
used to incarnate or exorcize fears of otherness in different historical
and cultural contexts. How can we relate the shadows of doubt that
obscure Joseph Conrad’s exoticism with the violent and grotesque Africa
depicted by Ben Okri? What are the connections between the crisis of
imperial propaganda announced by Robert Louis Stevenson and the
transcultural world portrayed by Salman Rushdie? To answer these ques-
tions we should examine the genre diachronically and determine the
crucial stages of its development. What is still needed is a comprehen-

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sive analysis of the different ways in which colonial or postcolonial
writers have adopted Gothic devices to voice fear or disorientation
throughout the centuries.

The literary transition from a Western viewpoint to the colonized’s

perspective is well illustrated by the works of some ‘cultural expatriates’,
who experience a condition of in-betweenness that grants them a
double outlook on both political and metaﬁctional matters. A case in
point is the ﬁction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Like other migrant authors,
Jhabvala has a personal history of displacement and exile.

Her long

residence in India does not only provide settings and characters for
her novels and short stories, but also gives her a chance to develop a
two-sided view of reality. Despite some negative responses to her works,

she can be regarded as a ‘border-crossing intellectual’ who tries to
combine two cultures in a new syncretic whole.

Her ability to traverse

limits emerges in the very structure of her works, whose complexity
deﬁes univocal or simplistic readings. Moreover, her interest in Gothic,
which dates back to her university years, conﬁrms her inclination for
ontological and narrative ambivalence.

As Judie Newman pointed out,

Jhabvala’s ﬁction is characterized by ‘a strong strain of Gothic’ which
‘feature demon lovers, mysterious Indian palaces with intricately
concealed secrets, ruined forts, poison, willing victims, plus the erotici-
sation of spirituality, with gurus standing in for sinister monks, and
ashrams for convents.’

These motifs are closely intertwined with

postcolonial conﬂicts – domination versus submission, hegemony
versus diversity, language versus silence – which appear in all their
tensions and aporias. Exactly because of her liminal position, Jhabvala
manages to conﬂate old formulas with contemporary problems, so that
many imperialistic clichés are exploded by the contact with an altered
reality.

This process of revision is at the core of the novel Heat and Dust,

whose elaborate structure is a criss-cross of postcolonial issues (political,
socio-cultural, sexual, linguistic and metanarrative) and Gothic para-
digms. First published in 1975, Heat and Dust threatens established
categories with its plot of seduction and persecution which deﬁes, rather
than conﬁrms, imperialistic stereotypes. If at ﬁrst sight its wide range of
Gothic topoi and strategies might seem to evoke the intrinsic conser-
vatism of traditional tales of terror, on reﬂection they appear as indexes
of a profound transformation of philosophical and literary principles.

By organizing narration in two interwoven sequences – a ‘framed’
Gothic story, in which past events are reconstructed retrospectively, and
a narrative ‘frame’ centred on the effects of transculturation – Jhabvala

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aims at producing a two-sided text which can correct historical ‘distor-
tions’. In brief, she employs structural parallelism to revise some preju-
diced ideas of British colonialism, which are ironically exposed in the
‘framed’ story to be challenged in the ‘frame’.

One of her main targets is the paternalistic relation of father-child

adopted by the theorists of imperial power to validate the subordina-
tion of ‘inferior races’. As we will see, Jhabvala shows her postcolonial
concern for racial discrimination by appropriating this very nexus and
reversing its Eurocentric valency. First, she problematizes the homology
between childhood and primitivism to expose the limits of a hierarchy
of human races based on the idea of immaturity. Secondly, she combines
the colonial antithesis adulthood versus infantilism with a Gothic scheme
of victimization, to unveil all the negativity of a will-to-power disguised
as ‘paternal’ condescension. Thirdly, she applies the resulting double
paradigm (father–child

+ villain–victim) to both temporal dimensions (the

colonial age of the ‘framed’ story and to the more recent epoch of the
‘frame’) in order to highlight the rapid transformations of cultural
stereotypes in half a century. This last stage of revision does not only
regard racial prejudices but also sexual ones, since the disquieting impli-
cations of the woman’s seduction in the remoter sequence are reversed
by the liberation of her modern counterpart.

The complexity of Jhabvala’s experimentation, which is carried out at

three main textual levels of Heat and Dust (the level of characterization,
as well as the spatial and the metaﬁctional ones), is not easy to catch.
It is only by perceiving the antiphrastic procedure she adopts that her
deconstructive attitude becomes evident. In the main, Jhabvala antici-
pates Said’s analysis of Orientalist discourse, since she displays the faults
inherent in the Western construction of the exotic Other. To accom-
plish this subversive aim, however, she does not challenge imperialistic
notions explicitly but uses parody and montage effects to dismantle
narrative conventions. Precisely, she deﬂates a whole range of Gothic
paradigms, both traditional and modern ones, to invalidate their racist
bias, and simultaneously weaves them with other narrative modes to
produce a ‘hybrid’ postcolonial text.

Heat and Dust opens with a short recollection of past events. After
summing up her family history, the anonymous narrator announces her
project of telling the story of Olivia Rivers, her step-grandmother who
eloped with an Indian prince ﬁfty years earlier, in 1923. This dark and
obscene story attracts her attention despite the censure imposed by the
elder members of her family. If they consider the scandal a ‘forbidden

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topic’, the young narrator is driven by an intense wish to solve the
mystery of Olivia’s behaviour.

To ﬁll in the many gaps left by letters

and ﬁrst-hand testimonies, she travels to India, hoping to discover the
truth by tracing the woman’s steps. Yet her journey proves more than
an epistemological search. ‘India always changes people, and I have
been no exception’, she announces before telling her adventures, which
she carefully tries to distinguish from the objective of her narrative
effort: ‘But this is not my story, it is Olivia’s as far as I can follow it’ (p.
2). The ambiguity of this latter statement testiﬁes to the complex
meaning of her investigation into Olivia’s secrets. On the one hand, her
claim for detachment has an antiphrastic valency, since it suggests
that her narrative inquest is also an existential quest for identity. While
visiting the places where Olivia lived, the narrator undergoes similar
experiences of fascination and displacement, which turn her into a puz-
zling ‘double’ of her step-grandmother. In so doing, she seems to ﬁnd
a temporary solution to her personal and generational crisis (like other
young Europeans, she seeks in India a spirituality that might replace the
unsatisfying materialism of the West). On the other hand, however, her
attempt to differentiate her story from Olivia’s must be read as a hint
to the cultural and social changes which have occurred in the span of
ﬁfty years. Instead of passively imitating her ancestor, the anonymous
voice shifts from heterodiegetic to homodiegetic narration to relate her
own ‘passage to India’, which amounts to an experience of difference in
sameness. This view is conﬁrmed by a comparative analysis of the Gothic
formulas and the actantial relations of Heat and Dust, which reveals sig-
niﬁcant discrepancies between the two narrative sequences.

Before examining the text in detail, let us brieﬂy summarize the two

interwoven plots. One of them deals with Olivia’s adventures, which
are reconstructed in 12 sections of varying length.

After marrying

Douglas Rivers, a District Ofﬁcer at Satipur, Olivia settles in India but
soon feels very lonely. She shuns the company of her boring and
prejudiced countrymen and, since her husband is always busy at work,
spends most of her time shut up in their bungalow. One day she meets
the Nawab of Khatm and develops a close friendship with him and
Harry, an Englishman living at the prince’s palace in an ambiguous posi-
tion. The strong and shadowy character of the Nawab fascinates both
Olivia and Harry, who are divided between disquiet and passion, suspi-
cion and surrender. In the end Olivia forms a liaison with the Indian
prince and, soon afterwards, she discovers herself to be pregnant.
Oppressed by the worry of delivering a coloured baby, she undergoes a
painful abortion. The Indian midwives who practise it use a primitive

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method that makes her sick, so that the truth is easily discovered by an
English physician. From this point onwards, she disappears from the
scene. The reader is informed that she seeks refuge at the Nawab’s palace
and later moves to his chalet in the Himalayas, where she spends the
rest of her life secluded from the outside world.

The second narrative sequence, which opens and closes the text,

includes the fragmentary ﬂashbacks of the ﬁrst story that is somehow
‘relived’ by the protagonist-narrator. After an initial shock due to the
extreme decay and poverty of Indian society, she yields to the fascina-
tion of the exotic country. Unlike her predecessor, however, she shows
a clear disposition to crossing boundaries, since she adopts local habits
of clothing, eating and living, and even manages to learn Hindustani.

Equally different is her sexual life, which at ﬁrst seems to parallel
Olivia’s, but ﬁnally leads her to a divergent course of action. Her affair
with Chid, an English convert to the Hindu religion, is replaced by a
more involving relationship with her Indian landlord, Inder Lal, who
impregnates her. After considering abortion for a short while, the nar-
rator decides to give birth to her baby and, without informing her lover
about her state, leaves for the mountains.

The protagonists’ antithetical choices with regard to abortion and

submission to their lovers, is the most apparent gap between the two
stories. Further divergences can be traced at the level of characteriza-
tion, by examining the Gothic passional syntax of both sequences. In
the ﬁrst place, Jhabvala challenges the equations suggested by outward
similarities between the characters (narrator

= Olivia; Inder Lal = Nawab;

Chid

= Douglas/Harry), since she reconﬁgures the power relations of the

‘frame’ in subversive terms. If we pay due attention to the narrator’s
actions, which are marked by the modality of wanting (i.e., to have expe-
riences, to write a story, to have her baby, to be free), we can realize
how far she is from embodying the victim role played by her step-
grandmother. Secondly, the author insinuates doubts in the ‘framed’
sequence itself. Instead of drawing types who are ethically and socially
recognizable, she creates effects of actantial instability by problematiz-
ing any simple polarities between good and evil, powerful and power-
less characters. Still ‘in embryo’ in the remoter sequence, this
deconstructing strategy becomes more evident in the 1973 story, which
unveils the negative consequences of colonialism on Indian economy
and society.

Let us ﬁrst investigate the passional conﬁguration and the Gothic

paraphernalia of Olivia’s story. From a generic perspective, its plot evi-
dences many Gothic ‘ingredients’, which are combined with the theme

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of colonial oppression. If Olivia and Harry play the role of helpless
victims, their ‘seducer’ is a typical Oriental villain, who associates with
a gang of dacoits (compared to ‘medieval bandits’ on p. 133), leads an
immoral and riotous life, usurps the ‘good hero’ of his wife, threatens
the colonialists’ authority, possesses great strength of will and personal
magnetism, lives in a labyrinthine old palace, and has a strong relish
for dark love (when he seduces Olivia, he combines Eros with Thanatos
by telling her a Gothic story of violence, p. 137).

His lustful and ﬁerce

personality makes him a formidable antagonist of the ‘noble and fair’
(p. 6) Douglas Rivers. The more the Nawab is associated with outward
and inward ‘darkness’, the ‘fairer and nobler’ Douglas appears, as testi-
ﬁed by Olivia’s preoccupation about the baby’s colour: ‘Douglas says
they [the Rivers babies] all have white-blond hair till they’re about
twelve.’ ‘Babies don’t have hair.’ ‘Indian babies do, I’ve seen them.
They’re born with lots of black hair. . . .’ (p. 162). The chromatic oppo-
sition white/black is here connected with the ethnocentric idea that
Europe is the model of humanity – an idea that dates back to Kant’s
hierarchy of ‘races’ and is later appropriated by colonial theorists.

Further proofs of Douglas’s role as a ‘white champion’ can be found in
his heroic manliness and in his paternalistic attitude to the Indians, as
the following quotations illustrate:

He was upright and just.

(p. 1)

She had always loved him for these qualities – for his imperturba-
bility, his English solidness and strength; his manliness.

(p. 116)

‘Their usual tricks. They’re full of them. They think they’re fright-
fully cunning but really they’re like children.’

(p. 38)

‘Supposing things change – I mean, what with Mr. Gandhi and these
people’ . . . He had no doubts at all, he said ‘They’ll need us a while
longer,’ with easy amused assurance.

(p. 89)

The father-child relation he tries to establish with the dominated

is, however, challenged by the Nawab’s usurpation. The Indian prince,
who represents the dangerous Other, deﬁes the spokesman of British

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superiority at two different levels: diegetically, by seducing and impreg-
nating his wife, and linguistically, by appropriating and reversing some
clichés of colonial discourse. This latter act of usurpation is suggested
by his qualiﬁcation of Dr Saunders in ‘inhuman’ terms (he is compared
to an animal on p. 121), as well as by the tender strictness he shows in
speaking to and about Harry: ‘Go to sleep! We are not talking with you
but with each other . . .’ (p. 44); ‘. . . he is like a child that doesn’t know
what it wants! We others have to decide everything for him’ (p. 78).
Douglas himself is once treated with father-like condescension. In
returning home from work he is welcomed by the prince, whose self-
conﬁdent behaviour reverses their roles of guest and host: ‘He sprang
to his feet to receive Douglas and held out his hand in hearty English
greeting. It was as if he were the host and this his house in which it was
his duty to make Douglas welcome’ (p. 56).

If Douglas and the Nawab compete to fulﬁl the role of dominators,

the objects of their conﬂict merge together into a Janus-faced victim
ﬁgure. Olivia, whose beauty awakens male desire, and the ‘feminine’
Harry – he is ‘a very improper Englishman’ (p. 43) who shrinks from the
aggressiveness of British culture

– are both connoted in terms of wom-

anish vulnerability and become the target of the two virile antagonists:
the fair representative of imperialistic manliness, on one side, and his
devilish Indian counterpart, on the other. The result is a triangular
scheme in which the Oriental villain challenges the Western hero by
stealing two of his ‘possessions’. The equation between the victims is
conﬁrmed by their dominant passions. First, Olivia’s and Harry’s behav-
iour is modalized in terms of not-knowing and being unable to break their
dependence on the seducer (both refuse to acknowledge reality and
annul their own will to please the Nawab). This modalization is evident
in sentences such as ‘I don’t know’, ‘I’d like to know’ (pp. 142–3) refer-
ring to the prince’s misdeeds they try to ignore, or in the contorted
meaning of the expression ‘he ought to want to’ (p. 75), used by Olivia
to explain Harry’s (and indirectly her own) inability to resist. A second
proof of their likeness is the jealousy they feel of each other. Olivia’s
envy of the friendship between the two men, Harry’s sudden ‘umbrage’
when he foresees her affair with the prince, (‘You’re jealous, Harry, that’s
what it is. Yes you are! . . . You want to be the only one’, [p. 130]), and
his ﬁnal departure for England when he is replaced by Olivia, are all
symptoms of a levelling passion ruled by ‘a principle of an approached
identity’. From a Greimassian perspective, each of the two victims can
be seen as the other’s alter ego, since they are gradually equated to the

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rival simulacrum they project: ‘For them to be compared, the two
simulacra of rivals must be comparable’.

This Gothic pattern of usurpation (villain versus hero), seduction

(villain – victims) and depersonalization (victim

= victim

) is reinforced

by other terriﬁc or mysterious elements, such as the ritual of suttee or
widow-burning, the secrets of the purdah (the female apartments of the
palace in which intruders are spied upon or poisoned), or the abortions
practised in the dark and ﬁlthy alleys of Khatm. Considered all together,
these elements seem to connote Indian culture in terms of savagery and
barbarism, while the English community appears as a bulwark of civi-
lization. Yet we should avoid concluding that Heat and Dust is imbued
with colonial propaganda. As we have already suggested, the Gothic plot
of the ‘framed’ story is undermined by some deconstructive strategies
that dissolve clear-cut antitheses to invalidate the imperial rhetoric
and ethos from within. A ﬁrst effect of disorder is created by the moral
ambiguity of the ‘good hero’. To question traditional characterization,
Jhabvala underlines the inner weaknesses of Douglas Rivers, who is far
from proving an outstanding model. Through irony and indirection she
taints his ﬁgure with hypocrisy (‘I just told them, in a roundabout way,
that they were a pack of rogues’, p. 38), gives his conduct childish con-
notations (‘[he had] the eyes of a boy who read adventure stories and
had dedicated himself to live up to their code of courage and honour’,
p. 40), and associates his admiration for British military heroes with
sterility. This latter connection is implicitly drawn by Olivia during one
of their Sunday walks in the British cemetery. In noticing Douglas’s
reverence for the victims of the Mutiny, she feels oppressed by sadness
and gets angry ‘both with him and the dead heroes’ (p. 107). Overcome
by her mood, she relates it to her inability to get pregnant, thus estab-
lishing a parallel between heroism and infertility that is iterated a few
pages later: ‘But now suddenly she thought: what manliness? He can’t
even get me pregnant!’ (p. 116).

The subversive implications of this nexus are conﬁrmed by the

Nawab’s act of seduction, which amounts to more than a private event.
Thanks to his fecundity, he does not only deprive Douglas of his repro-
ductive function but also reverses colonial relations, by appropriating a
paternal role. Equally disruptive are some positive features of the prince’s
personality. His tenderness for Olivia, his romantic idealization of his
ancestor Amanullah Khan, a rude but heroic warrior, and his political
vulnerability, make him more sympathetic and ‘human’. In marked
contrast with traditional villains, the Nawab is a ‘round character’ who

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can behave like a gentle lover, a worshipper of courage and a defender
of his oppressed country. The very fact that he seduces Olivia in the
open air mitigates his aggression. Instead of the Gothic palace of Khatm,
he chooses the grove outside Baba Firdaus Shrine to start his affair with
the woman – a natural, beautiful, and sacred spot which is doubly con-
noted in terms of fertility (an oasis in the desert, it is also the locus where
Indian women make votive offerings to get pregnant).

In the second sequence, the dismantlement of stereotypes turns into
parody and hybridism. Gothic formulas are still present in the ﬁrst
journal entry, where the narrator tells of her arrival in India. A few pages
later, however, she succeeds in overcoming her fear of the unknown.
Her passage from horror to attraction is emblematic of change and rein-
forces the demolition of clichés carried out at the structural level. An
analysis of the ﬁrst section of the narrative ‘frame’ will clarify this point.
After reconstructing her family history, the narrator describes her ﬁrst
night in Bombay, where she meets a Christian sister who has long
worked there as a missionary. Inﬂuenced by the old woman, who retains
a jaundiced view of India (‘Because you see, dear, nothing human means
anything here’, p. 6), she perceives the city as a frightening inferno, in
which sick and crippled people, comprising derelict Europeans, wander
in the dirty streets ‘like souls in hell’ (p. 6). The sister herself is com-
pared to a ghost and assimilated to the spectral atmosphere of the place,
since her negative visionariness is a product of a religious and cultural
bias that stiﬂes any signs of vitality.

Things change abruptly in the second entry written a fortnight later

(p. 6). From this moment onwards, the narrator learns to master her
contempt for the unheimlich and progressively merges with Indian
culture. Her adoption of local habits testiﬁes to her triumph over colo-
nial prejudices as well as to her reconﬁguration of two Gothic para-
digms: respectively, the traditional female victim who is warned on her
arrival in a strange place, and the modern-Gothic travelling heroine
who can escape perils only by deciphering the misleading appearance
of a male authoritarian ﬁgure.

The ﬁrst paradigm is turned upside-

down by the narrator’s integration into the exotic environment, which
invalidates the missionary’s obsolete world-view.

The second paradigm

is counteracted by the innocuous conduct of her two lovers, who fail
in reproducing the patriarchal model embodied by Douglas and the
Nawab. By escaping Gothic categories, the narrator inaugurates a
new course of action which is not only anti-paternalistic and anti-
patriarchal, but also fully respectful of cultural and racial differences.

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Against the values of the past, she appears as a postcolonial subject, who
asserts the need for a harmonious society. The privilege she grants to
the cultural encounter is conﬁrmed by her decision to give birth to a
half-breed baby who preﬁgures the end of colonial antagonism.

To make this encounter even more subversive, Jhabvala parodies all

the Gothic relations of the ﬁrst story. A close look at the actantial and
passional scheme of the ‘frame’ will reveal her attempt to overturn the
persecution-victimization triangle of the ‘framed’ sequence. Generally
ignored by critics, who have insisted on the superﬁcial analogies
between the two structural layers, this underlying scheme is essential to
make out the author’s ideological position with regard to postcolonial
issues.

If we summarize the narrator’s adventures, we obtain a triangular

pattern of inter-personal relations that is apparently reminiscent of the
ﬁrst sequence: an Englishwoman goes to India, is drawn into a liaison
with a countryman and later replaces him with an Indian lover, who
gives her a baby. Other details seem to validate this correspondence:
Inder Lal resembles the Nawab in having a strong-willed mother, a men-
tally unstable wife and a job marked by plots and treachery (although
he is only a government ofﬁcer); the blond Chid plays a similar sexual
role to Douglas but also shares much with Harry (apart from stomach
problems, he has the same experience of disillusionment and departure
from India); the narrator starts her affair with Inder Lal in the very place
where Olivia is seduced.

Yet, the passional trajectory of the second

story is signiﬁcantly altered. The dominant role played by Douglas and
usurped by the Nawab is here fulﬁlled by the narrator alone, who
cancels the tensions between the two juxtaposed heroes. No less to the
point, her sexual victims are neither jealous nor imitative of each other.
More than merging into one ﬁgure, they exemplify two different kinds
of postcolonial failings that are unmasked and overcome by the pro-
tagonist: the Westerner allured and defeated by India without being suc-
cessfully integrated (Chid) and the petty bourgeois native who idealizes
Western lifestyle and values (Inder Lal).

A clear index of the narrator’s position of strength is her gradual

distancing from Olivia’s model. If her ancestor is a passive fallen woman
who reproduces literary archetypes (like Tennyson’s heroines she waits
long for her lover and, after retiring from the world, sits in her chalet
‘glancing up from her embroidery to look out over the mountains’,
p. 175), the narrator manages to evade socio-sexual clichés. Bigger
and taller than her lovers, she lacks Olivia’s graceful beauty and is
explicitly compared with hijras (or eunuchs, pp. 9–10). These physical

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traits are reinforced by her strong personality. After yielding to Chid’s
sexual aggressions, for instance, she starts to rebel against her victim
role: ‘Every now and again he gets those monstrous erections of his and
I have to ﬁght him off . . . Today I got so exasperated with him, I threw
him out’ (p. 80). Similarly, it is she who decides to have an affair with
Inder Lal:

Sunk in his own troubles, he was no longer interested in my wishes.
But I wanted him to be . . . I laid my hand on his. . . . I could feel his
hand tremble under mine: and then I saw that his lips trembled too
. . . There was certainly fear in his eyes as they looked at me. He did
not know what to do next, nor what I was going to do next . . .
Although the next few moves were up to me, once I had made them
he was not slow to respond.

(p. 127)

The modal ‘wanted’ and the sequence of actions (she takes his hand
and makes the ﬁrst moves) equate the narrator with the Nawab, while
Inder Lal’s fear has much in common with Olivia’s sense of being
trapped by her seducer (p. 137). The Gothic structure of the ‘framed’
sequence is thus upset in the ‘frame’ by the protagonist’s slippage from
victimhood to authority. But what are the real implications of this
actantial reversal?

First and foremost, the narrator epitomizes the end of colonial con-

ﬂicts in post-independence India. Differently from Olivia, who suffers
the consequences of a struggle for supremacy, she nulliﬁes the opposi-
tion villain/hero by blending the two antagonists into her authoritative
ﬁgure. Secondly, she embarks on a diachronic and synchronic journey
to discover the insubstantiality of cultural frontiers and power relations.
Unlike Douglas and the Nawab, she is a ‘harmless’ dominator who does
not try to assert the racial superiority of her people, but uses her lovers
to gain a deeper knowledge of India and herself. The very fact that she
lacks the arrogance and the cruelty of the two colonial heroes (she never
willingly persecutes her ‘victims’ nor tries to limit their freedom) turns
her into a provocative emblem of transformation. A product of the lib-
erated Seventies, the narrator impersonates an open-minded Westerner
who dispels the remnants of colonial hostility. Her sexual emancipation
is not only a parodic reversal of the equation political oppression

= seduc-

tion (exempliﬁed by Olivia’s tragic affair), but also the symbol of a free
encounter with the Other.

A conﬁrmation of her supercession of colonial prejudices can be

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found in her perception of the places once inhabited by Olivia. The
ruined palace of Khatm inspires her with an elegiac sense of passing
away, but retains none of its former Gothic connotations. Similarly, the
sight of the abandoned British cemetery makes her feel that all the ten-
sions of the colonial past are deﬁnitely buried: ‘It is strange how, once
graves are broken and overgrown in this way, then the people in them
are truly dead’ (p. 24). If the overgrown tombs of the dead soldiers testify
to the disappearance of Douglas’s heroic model, the limbless marble
angel erected by the Saunders has lost both its Western appearance and
its symbolic value (in the ‘framed’ sequence it represented the British
fear of a hostile environment). The same fate is reserved for the colo-
nialists’ bungalows, which have been turned into municipal ofﬁces.
Described as places of corruption and tricks, they are nonetheless poten-
tially regenerative loci, since their conversion is an integral part of the
process of ‘Indianization’.

Closely related to the idea of transculturation is the question of female
emancipation. A comparison between the two stories reveals Jhabvala’s
attempt to overturn Gothic role-playing by depicting a group of liber-
ated women who escape the gloomy fate of their remote ‘doubles’. The
most obvious example is offered by the narrator, whose liminal ﬁgure
is both physically and psychologically distant from Olivia. Her success
in avoiding duplicating her step-grandmother’s model is both due to
her personal strength (her courage and independence from male
support) and to the different world she is living in – apart from ‘pro-
gressive’ Europe, she experiences a new India in which some relevant
changes have taken place. By focusing on the narrator’s individual and
environmental potentialities, Jhabvala rewrites the Gothic plot of the
ﬁrst story from a feminist angle. The main targets of her revision are
the objectivation of women consequent on the masculine use of sex as
an instrument of power, the rigid sequence sin-fall-punishment, and the
Orientalist view of the East as a mysterious and threatening woman.

As we have already seen, the narrator counteracts the negativity of

female objectivation by appropriating a male role. In so doing, she also
infringes the traditional regulations of female sexuality, her adulterous
and inter-racial affairs being neither condemned nor punished. Whereas
Olivia pays for her ‘sin’ with a seclusion that amounts to a social suicide,
her step-granddaughter is rewarded with superior knowledge and a bliss-
ful state of maternity: ‘It was absolutely clear to me now that I wanted
my pregnancy and the completely new feeling – of rapture – of which
it was the cause’ (p. 165). The contrast between the two women is made

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patent in the conclusion. Unable to see the mountains from Olivia’s
chalet because of a heavy rain, the narrator decides to climb further up.
Her ascension is a symbol of freedom that contrasts with the idea of
imprisonment associated with the chalet – a peculiar building ‘with a
dash of Gothic cathedral’ (p. 74) from which Olivia looks out like a
twentieth-century Lady of Shalott.

The last target of the narrator’s criticism requires more attention. In

order to reverse Orientalist clichés, Jhabvala portrays some provocative
ﬁgures of women who challenge the equation female

= corrupt(ing)

otherness. First of all, she insinuates doubts about the ‘healthy model’
that the colonizers’ wives should provide to counteract Indian
‘unwholesome’ femininity. An effective example is the parodic charac-
terization of Mrs Saunders, whose mental instability is explicitly con-
nected with sexual mania. Her vulgarity, her inclination towards
thoughts of death and her obsession with sexual harassment, are
nothing but symptoms of a morbid disposition that is akin to the
Western idea of exotic femininity (quite ironically, Mrs Saunders is the
wife of the strictest spokesman of colonial ethos, who ﬁnds ‘something
weak and rotten’ [p. 170] in Olivia). Equally disrupting is Olivia’s
defence of suttee. Driven by a wish to contradict her countrymen, the
woman asserts her admiration for this supreme expression of wifely
love. Her paradoxical statement ‘I’d be grateful for such a custom’ (p.
60), which positively impresses Douglas (‘She saw his hard look melt
away into tenderness’, p. 60), makes a contradiction come to the fore,
since it implies a coincidence of the British Angel-of-the-House model
with a barbaric custom.

Secondly, Jhabvala demonstrates the groundlessness of imperialistic

prejudices by reversing the stale typiﬁcation of the ‘framed’ sequence.
If in the colonial past all native women appear as corrupted ﬁgures (for
example, the fanatic suttees, the dangerous midwives, the purdah plot-
ters and, especially, the mysterious Begum, who duplicates the Nawab’s
act of penetration by arranging Olivia’s abortion), in the second story
they are replaced by positive modern ‘doubles’.

An emblematic char-

acter, in this regard, is Maji – a midwife who becomes a friend of the
narrator’s. In sheer contrast with the female models produced by colo-
nial ethos, Maji represents an advanced Indian woman, whose mental
balance and wisdom derive from her ability to combine tradition with
innovation, rationality with spirituality. A strong and generous widow
who escaped suttee (the practice was abolished much earlier), she never
denies the sacredness of the ancient ritual nor condemns the practice
of abortion, which she sees as a social necessity. At the same time,

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however, she convinces the narrator that she should keep her baby, thus
assuming the role of a propitiatory goddess: ‘a supernatural ﬁgure with
supernatural powers which it now seemed to me she had used not to
terminate my pregnancy but to make sure of it: make sure I saw it
through’ (p. 173). Her ability to solve tensions and heal conﬂicts is
exempliﬁed by her preparation of a ‘fertile’ ground for a multicultural
society, in which past and present, West and East, can harmoniously co-
exist. In this sense, she counterbalances the negativity of the old
missionary of Bombay, whose sterile ghostliness derives from the total
commitment to a repressive ideology (a lethal blend of Christian self-
sacriﬁce and racist ‘humanism’).

The true heir of Maji’s ideal femininity is the narrator herself, who

fulﬁls a maternal function at three different levels: literally, culturally
and metaﬁctionally. Apart from bearing a half-breed child, she repre-
sents a ‘fecund’ cultural hybrid, who outdoes the imperfect models
incarnated by her lovers. Unlike Chid, she does not yield to the fasci-
nation of India to experience a later stage of disillusionment, but
mediates between the two realities. (Chid’s passivity is symbolized by
his burning up his clothes and shaved hair on a suttee-like ‘funeral pyre’,
pp. 64–5.) Equally innovative is her cultural openness by comparison
with Inder Lal’s narrow-mindedness. The Indian clerk, who is ‘blinded’
by a total admiration for Western values (‘He says why should people
who have everything – motor cars, refrigerators – come here to such a
place where there is nothing?’, p. 95), provides a negative model of
transculturation, which is conﬁrmed by other ‘Westernized’ minor
characters (such as the Nawab’s nephew, Karim). Roughly the reverse is
true of the narrator, who plants the ‘seeds’ of Indian spirituality into
her European ‘womb’ to generate a hopeful alternative.

The same maternal image is applicable to the metanarrative function

she fulﬁls. To tell her (and Olivia’s) story, the narrator plays two roles
together: she acts both as the reader-interpreter of some fragmentary
testimonies (letters, interviews) and as the creator of the narrative
sequences which ﬁll in the numerous textual gaps. In accomplishing
this double task, she acquires a writerly status, which turns her into the
author’s alter ego. Like the narrator, who is busy with deciphering (and
producing) stories, Jhabvala explores the process of text-construction
and experiments with various techniques to renew the Anglo-Indian tra-
dition. The result of her efforts is Heat and Dust, an innovative text deriv-
ing from the combination of different narrative modes: from dramatic
to pictorial, from epistolary to exotic, from (post)colonial to Gothic.
This latter style, in particular, is parodied to reproduce all the tensions

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and the transformative energies of the contemporary world. Whereas in
traditional Gothic the idea of transgression was linked to the threat of
disintegration of an orderly system, in Jhabvala’s narration it refers to
the continuous process of dissolution and reconstitution of limits
(socio-cultural, ontological and stylistic ones), which is the distinctive
feature of postcolonial reality.

Notes

1. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1–2.
2. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grifﬁths and Helen Tifﬁn, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial

Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 188.

3. Jhabvala was born in Germany of Polish Jewish parents. In 1939 the family

escaped to Britain, where she received her education. After marrying an
Indian architect, she spent 25 years in India. In 1976 she took up residence
in New York.

4. Most expressions of dissent came from Indian critics, who accused her of

perpetuating colonial stereotypes. An example is Nissim Ezekiel’s objection
to the Booker Prize she received for Heat and Dust in 1975; cf. ‘Cross-
Cultural Encounter in Literature’, The Indian P.E.N., 43, 11–12 (November-
December 1977), 5.

5. Cf. Gita Rajan, ‘(Con)ﬁguring Identity: Cultural Space of the Indo-British

Border Intellectual’, in Gisela Brinker-Bagler and Sidonie Smith, eds, Writ-
ing New Identities: Gender, Nation and Immigration in Contemporary Europe,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 80–1.

6. In her MA thesis Jhabvala discusses some preconceptions of the Oriental tale,

among which there is the Gothic paradigm of the ‘unfortunate maiden fallen
into the hands of a dusky seducer’. Judie Newman, The Ballistic Bard:
Postcolonial Fictions (London and New York: Arnold, 1995), pp. 71, 83.

7. Ibid.
8. In investigating some basic contradictions of Gothic, Fred Botting deﬁnes

the genre as ‘open to a play of ambivalence, a dynamic of limit and trans-
gression that both restores and contests boundaries’: Botting, Gothic, p. 9.

9. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (London: Abacus, 1991), p. 2. All sub-

sequent quotations are taken from this edition. Page references will be given
in parentheses in the text.

10. The ﬁrst eleven sections about Olivia are all introduced by the date 1923.

They alternate with another eleven sections written in the form of journal
entries and set in 1973, which are diegetically and thematically congruent.
In the twenty-third, and last, section the stories of Olivia and the narrator
are ﬁnally brought together without any time markers.

11. Despite her affair with the Nawab, Olivia has no desire to cope with the cul-

tural Other. She never learns the local language nor mixes with ‘uncivilized’
Indians (not surprisingly, she admires the Nawab’s European qualities most).
Besides, she furnishes both her houses in a cosy Western fashion, as Harry
makes clear by comparing her sitting room to an ‘oasis’ (p. 33) in the Indian
desert.

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12. It is no coincidence that the modal to want is obsessively pronounced by the

Nawab or reported by his two ‘victims’. For instance, Harry repeats it to con-
vince Olivia to accept his invitation, after declaring that ‘one does not say
no to such a person’ (p. 34): ‘Olivia, he wants to give a party.’ . . . ‘He most
particularly wants you to come. Of course there’ll be a car.’ ‘Douglas is dread-
fully busy.’ ‘He wants you both to come. He wants it most awfully. . . .’ (p. 35,
my emphasis).

13. According to postcolonial scholars, the Enlightenment philosophers were

responsible for the limited interpretation of the word ‘humanity’. A much-
quoted prejudice is Kant’s view of the ‘white brunette’ as the perfect skin
tone, and his arrangement of the other races in a descendant order accord-
ing to their approximation to the ‘white’ ideal – from the ﬁrst race of very
blond northern Europeans to the fourth race of olive-yellow Indians, who
are placed even lower than black Africans; cf. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed.,
Postcolonial African Philosophy: a Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997),
pp. 1–21.

14. Often compared to E.M. Forster for his ambiguous relation with Indian

males, Harry personiﬁes the Forsterian liberal humanist creed. His belief in
the primacy of personal relations is emphasized by his criticism of the manly
behaviour of his countrymen abroad as well as at home. Notice in particu-
lar his equation of colonialism with the bullying system of British schools:
‘They’re the sort of people who’ve made life hell for me ever since I can
remember. At school and everywhere’ (p. 161).

15. Algirdas Julien Greimas and Jacques Fontanille, The Semiotics of Pas-

sions: From States of Affairs to States of Feelings, trans. Paul Perron and Frank
Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 152 (both
quotations).

16. Cf. Laurie Sucher, The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: the Politics of Passion

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 12–13, 62. For the heroine of
modern Gothic see also Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Women
Writers (New York: Anchor Books, 1977).

17. ‘. . . the novel departs from the formula, in which the heroine-victim dis-

covers, to her chagrin, that the warnings were correct.’ Laurie Sucher, The
Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, p. 106.

18. See Judie Newman, The Ballistic Bard, p. 44.
19. Cf. Jasmine Gooneratne, Silence, Exile and Cunning: the Fiction of Ruth Prawer

Jhabvala (London: Sangam Books, 1991), p. 239.

20. The parallelism is explicitly drawn in the text. When a midwife inserts a twig

into Olivia’s vagina, the Begum stares at the Englishwoman with a face that
resembles her son’s: ‘She did look like the Nawab, very much’ (p. 168).

21. According to ethnologists, pregnancy is a threshold stage between two

ritualized acts of border-crossing. On this view the narrator’s state can be
read as a cultural rite of passage that preﬁgures the ‘birth’ of an integrated
society; cf. Arnold Van Gennep, Les rites de passage (Paris: Émile Nourry,
1909).

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The Ghastly and the Ghostly:
the Gothic Farce of Farrell’s
‘Empire Trilogy’

Victor Sage

172

My starting point is a small but haunting moment in J.G. Farrell’s The
Singapore Grip (1978), an image which, though insigniﬁcant from the
point of view of the plot, stands out from the page. Matthew Webb,
the plump, owlish, idealist son of Old Webb, has just arrived in
Singapore, at the behest of Walter Blackett, his father’s old partner. He
is taken to the (misnamed, decrepit) Mayfair Building, ‘a vast and ram-
bling bungalow built on a score of fat, square pillars’, where Matthew’s
father has spent many of the last years of his life in the company of the
beautiful Vera Chaing. Matthew is taken round the side of the building:
‘Here he glimpsed a tennis court, disused, from whose baked mud surface
giant thistles had grown up and now waited like silent skeleton players
in the gloom.’

The richness of this image is linked to its ambiguity. This

is a grotesquely comic moment, worthy of Dickens, and it is also a
profoundly uncanny moment. Rude natural growth forms a parodic
metaphor for the British imperial culture that has already substantially
vanished, whose decay is personiﬁed, with reversed anthropomorphic
shock, as ‘silent skeleton players in the gloom’, waiting for the last
trump, or, bathetically, for the game to begin, for someone to serve.

Whether one sees it as predominantly uncanny or predominantly

grotesque and comic depends on what metaphorical weight we, as
readers, give to the adjective ‘skeleton’ (is it more like the phrase ‘a
skeleton crew’, or a strange echo of The Ancient Mariner?); or how much
(of ourselves) we are prepared to yield to the potential sublime of this
‘gloom’ and the sinister nature of the jungle’s encroachment; and
connect them with the insubstantial state of these long-dead players
masquerading as nastily material, life-size growths?

It may be objected that this epiphany is just a trope, an isolated

metaphor, a Dickensian jeu d’esprit, and that one should not make

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such a fuss about it. But an obvious structural extension of this ﬁgura-
tive logic is the extraordinary scene in this novel in which Matthew
and Vera visit what is, for him, a ‘decidedly creepy place’ (p. 344), a
Chinese Dying House, where the dying are brought by their families
and where Matthew, ‘blundering between these racks of moribund
people in the gloom . . . felt like Orpheus descending into the under-
world’ (p. 340). Here, they are surrounded by the dying smallholders
from one of his own rubber plantations, who have been ruined by the
corrupt practices of the ﬁrm he has inherited from his father, Blackett
and Webb:

‘Quite true, sir,’ piped up another quavering voice at Matthew’s
elbow, causing him to start violently and peer into the gloom where
another of the shadowy cadavers, hitherto lying supine on the lowest
rack and displaying no signs of life, had now collected up two
sets of bones and thrown them over the side of his tray; after
dangling uncertainly for a while they anchored themselves to the
ﬂoor and proved to be legs; then, with a further scraping of bones,
their owner levered himself politely to his feet and stood swaying
beside Matthew. ‘Quite true, sir. Controller of Rubber listen only to
European estates. He have ﬁve men on his committee from estates
. . . only one smallholder! On his Rubber Regulation Committee he
have twenty-seven men from estates, still only one from smallholders.
And yet smallholders produce half country’s rubber! That is not fair,
sir. It is disgusting. Quite true, sir.’ And he sank back with a moan
into the shadows and a moment later there came a rattling sound.
‘Oh dear,’ thought Matthew, ‘but still, he’s probably had a good
innings.’

(p. 345)

The Blimpish slang of ‘good innings’ here is, to the modern reader, strik-
ingly inappropriate in tone; it neatly reveals the unconscious narcissism
involved in Matthew’s liberal idealism. But the threat is immediately
renewed: others are waiting to take his place, plucking at Matthew’s
clothes, all displaying, in their skeletal living–dead state, and in the
yellowing documents they fumble for in their deathbeds, proof of the
plot of the European Estates to starve out and destroy the indigenous
smallholders. Vera has led her fat, bespectacled Orpheus into this
Chinese Underworld where the sins of the imperial fathers are visited
upon the son. The danse macabre – the profane resurrection – is a
mixture of last trump and Complaints Commission:

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All around him in the semi-darkness, as if summoned by the last
trump for a ﬁnal dispensation of justice over the doings of this imper-
fect world, supine ﬁgures were sitting up and casting off their shrouds
and bandages, while others were clambering down from the tiers of
shelves on which they had been stretched. He sighed again and
looked at his watch as they crowded round him.

(p. 347)

The hybrid effect is genuinely disturbing. Pathos mixes with gallows
humour. Horror, and the threat of the ‘sinister’ Other, is present in the
metaphor, but dismissed to the periphery of the reader’s response, and
may not even be precisely identiﬁed (Death? the Chinese?). We can’t
quite tell which sort of scene we are in. The ‘skeleton’ in this scene is a
spectre of fair play resurrected to haunt the liberal conscience of the
second generation. Matthew’s bluff, defensive joke – the way the text
cancels the last trump with his glance at his watch – shows graphically
the limits of his ability to empathize, in a familiar (but here quite inap-
propriate) gesture of comic resignation that might come out of a Carry
On ﬁlm. The upsurge of the Gothic register here is inseparable, on the
one hand, from the novel’s satirical, but precise exposure of the way
Blackett and Webb went about creating a monopoly of the resources of
rubber production; and, on the other, from a Dickensian comedy of the
grotesque body that carnivalizes the apocalypse.

At this point, it is worth broadening the critical picture, because the
hybridity of these effects creates an interpretative puzzle. Farrell’s repu-
tation as a writer is based on his contribution to the historical novel.
Traditionally, the historical novel is assimilated to a form of neo-realism,
according to the most inﬂuential analysis of it – Lukács’s The Historical
Novel. In this persuasive version of the genre, it is Scott and not Dickens,
for example, who yields the teleological model for how the Plot of
History is to be represented. The ‘Empire Trilogy’ thus moves through
Troubles (1970) and The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) towards its one great
realist goal, and The Singapore Grip emerges, for some, as the ‘Tolstoyan’
apotheosis, its greater realism justifying, in many eyes, Farrell’s
maturity as a writer. There is no doubt Farrell himself compounded this
view, and was pleased with the reviewer who made this point.

R.G. Binns’s lively account of Farrell in his 1986 Contemporary Writers

monograph, which helped keep Farrell’s reputation alive, is nowhere
near as reductive as this, but you can feel the pressure of this view on

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his account of Troubles, for example. It is clear that he wants to keep
the Gothic in its place:

The Majestic hotel, like the House of Usher, is ineluctably doomed
and collapses into ruins at the end of the narrative. But Troubles,
though sometimes described as Gothic, and while it makes use of
some of the properties of this genre, conveys the idea of decay and
sickness in a rather different sense from Poe. Farrell is interested in
tangible physical decay rather than disorder of the psyche and the
atmosphere at the Majestic too often dissolves into comedy or irony
ever to feel chilling or frightening. The claim which is sometimes
made that the Majestic’s ﬁery end is a reworking of a Gothic con-
vention rather overlooks the fact that arson attacks on large pro-
perties owned by the Anglo-Irish gentry were commonplaces at this
period in Irish history (Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September [1927],
which is also set against the background of the troubles, ends with
the great house Danielstown burning to the ground).

Realism cancels out Gothic; in the bracing air of reference to the ‘his-
torically real’, the Gothic cannot survive, because (the assumption is
visible) Gothic is (1) an exhausted nineteenth-century genre; and (2) a
kind of writing devoted to ‘the psyche’. Interestingly, Elizabeth Bowen’s
reputation has shifted in the 1990s from the old standard view of her
as a female clone of Henry James with regard to realism, to an explorer
of the Anglo-Irish Uncanny, so the idea of bringing her as a witness has
a different resonance now, after the recent work of W.J. McCormack,
Roy Foster and Julian Moynahan on the hyphenated and insubstantial
void, the life-in-death and death-in-life, present in the writing of the
Anglo-Irish tradition.

There may be other reasons for Bowen’s feeling

of afﬁnity with Farrell’s trilogy than corroboration of its realism.
Modern Gothic is not just a matter of genre conventions: we assume it
is still relevant in the post-war period, because its recultivation of the
Sublime is a discourse about decay, of both the psyche and what Count
Volney referred to in the early nineteenth century as the Ruins of
Empires. And that discourse, I shall argue, acts an anti-historicizing
language.

In Farrell, these effects arise out of an ironically pure and repeated

concentration on the motif from the horror tradition of moments of
misperception, often (but not exclusively) of peripheral vision. This is
the tradition of what I will call la coda dell ’occhio – ‘the tail of the eye’.

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The expression goes back at least to Le Fanu, another Anglo-Irish Gothic
writer, who acknowledges the Italian origins of his phrase in describing
the phenomenon (though the phenomenon itself is much older). The
phrase, and the phenomenon, is then appropriated in the next
generation by Le Fanu’s editor and disciple, M.R. James, who makes it
the basis of many of the nasty epiphanies in his own stories, and thus
makes it available for twentieth-century writers.

These epiphenomena, arising on the retina or in the ear, occur

momentarily. In the horror tradition, they are usually described in a
rhetorical sequence that always ends up reasserting a sceptical or dis-
believing, cynically materialist, viewpoint, denying them as illusions
or, rather, delusions of the individual subject, momentary derangements
of the perceptual apparatus. Closer acquaintance usually reveals a
mundane object, and yet, nervously, after the misperception has been
efﬁciently banished, transformed by reason, it often lingers on in the
text as an uncanny moment.

This is a tradition that goes back to Ann Radcliffe’s adaptation of

Burke and Gilpin’s rhetoric about obscurity, distance, and sublime land-
scapes.

The story of the nineteenth-century Gothic is the story of the

domestication of the sublime. The sublime is provoked by Nature, or,
its human equivalent, ruined military or ecclesiastical architecture, the
grander and more ambitious the better. The eighteenth-century Gothic
adds an analogy with the graveyard, the skull beneath the skin. By the
1840s, all this has been translated indoors, and not without humour:
for the emotionally myopic Lockwood, coming from the Midland
counties of England, the parlour of Wuthering Heights is absurdly
‘vast’, more like a Cathedral nave than a domestic space, and full of
threatening peripheral obscurities: ‘. . . and other dogs haunted other
recesses.’

(It is also worth reminding ourselves that peripheral vision is

an evolutionary advantage in a world of predators.) Civilization has
retreated from the place and what remains is ‘other’: wild, anarchic,
barbarous, dangerous, and – one of Farrell’s favourite terms – ‘sinister’.

Farrell’s reader often ﬁnds him or herself imprisoned in a pair of

short-sighted eyes, or trapped in one of the other senses, peering into
the ‘gloom’ like Matthew at the skeleton players behind the Mayfair.
Here, from Troubles, is Major Brendan Archer, arriving back at the
Majestic Hotel after a trip to Dublin in 1919:

The Major did not arrive until after dark and it would not have sur-
prised him to ﬁnd nobody there to greet him. However, as he climbed
the stone steps and dragged open the massive front door he saw there

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was a glimmer of light in the foyer. The electric light appeared not
to be functioning but an oil lamp was burning dimly on the recep-
tion desk and beside it, asleep on a wooden chair, was the old man-
servant, Murphy. He started violently as the Major touched his arm
and gave a gasp of terror; it was true that there was something eerie
about this vast shadowy cavern and the Major himself felt a shiver
of apprehension as his eyes tried to probe beyond the circle of light
into the darker shadows where the white ﬁgure of Venus ﬂickered
like a wraith.

Looking ‘beyond the circle of light’ is a ﬁxed and repeated moment
throughout Farrell’s trilogy. It is the uncanny point at which the surface
of the world begins to transform itself into its grotesquely true dimen-
sions. Here, the ‘wraith’ of Venus – a perfect piece of pretentious
imperial bric-a-brac which he will ship home to England as the only
thing remaining from the conﬂagration – is a metaphor for Brendan’s
futile search for love (and, increasingly, truth) amongst the more alarm-
ing aspects of the Irish ‘gloom’.

The reading process in Troubles is not primarily a forward movement,

but a lateral exposure to the burgeoning vitality of decay, a scattering
of signs which the reader has already encountered early on in the
gloom of the Majestic Hotel’s Palm Court. This sublime space is the
emblematic setting for the ﬁrst encounter between the Major, and
Angela, his ﬁancée:

The foliage, the Major continued to notice as he took his seat, was
really amazingly thick; there were creepers not only dangling from
above but also running in profusion over the ﬂoor, leaping out to
seize any unwary object that remained in one place for too long. A
standard lamp at his elbow, for instance, had been throttled by a
snake of greenery that had circled up its slender metal stem as far as
the black bulb that crowned it like a bulging eyeball. It had no shade
and the bulb he assumed to be dead until, to his astonishment,
Angela fumbled among the dusty leaves and switched it on, pre-
sumably so that she could take a good look at him. Whether or not
she was dismayed by what she saw she switched it off again with a
sigh after a moment and the gloom returned.

(p. 18)

Farrell’s negative sublime here – the energy of this indoor jungle which
arises from its cultural decay – is carried on the vehicle of farce. The

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farce is the farce of entropy, matter that exchanges its functions (a
process that corresponds to mistaken identity in the farce’s plot) in a
lively-looking fashion, while constantly getting older. Time does not
exist in the ‘battlemented mass’ of the Majestic. Instead, objects repeat
the message of their perpetual decay to the Major’s eyes. Angela soon
spends most of her time dying in some remote room upstairs. She is his
reason for being there. Meanwhile his eyes are glued on the trays
brought up and down the stairs by the cook, whose agency, and even
presence, vanish even as they are implied:

Apples – after all, there was a mountain of them in the apple house
which had to be eaten – played a signiﬁcant part in the diet of those
living at the Majestic. One day, however, he noticed a raw apple
travelling upstairs that looked so fresh and shining that it might even
have been an early arrival of the new season’s crop. On the way down
it was still there on the tray but one despairing bite had been taken
out of it. he could see the marks of small teeth that had clipped a
shallow oval furrow from its side, the exposed white ﬂesh already
beginning to oxidize and turn brown, like an old photograph or a
love-letter.

(p. 65)

The technique is purely metonymic: the ‘realistic’ detail here is a cele-
bration of decay. The apple has already become sepia, history, a record
of an apple, as it starts to rot. Angela whose trace it is, is in a sense,
already dead, as indeed is Dr Ryan, who comes to visit her:

These visits normally took a long time. The reason was that Dr Ryan,
however alert his mind, had to cope with a body so old and worn
out as to be scarcely animate. Watching him climb the stairs towards
his patient was like watching hands of a clock: he moved so slowly
that he might not have been moving at all. One day the major saw
him on his way upstairs, clinging to the banister as a snail clings to
the bark of a tree. After he had smoked a cigarette and glanced
through the newspaper he happened to pass through the foyer again
and there was the doctor, still clinging to the banister and still
apparently not moving, but nevertheless much nearer to the top.

(p. 70)

The pastiche of Beckett here is unmistakable: Angela, whose ‘blooming’,
as Beckett put it, ‘is a budding withering’, has already disappeared. Dr

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Ryan’s mind, uncluttered as it is by much of a body, is unusually clear:
his muttered philosophy is that of entropic decline, expressed as loss of
substance:

There is no rock of ages cleft for anyone and one must accept the
fact that a person (‘You too Edward, and the Major, and this young
boy as well’) . . . a person is only a very temporary and makeshift
affair, as is the love one has for him . . . and so Edward must under-
stand that this young girl who had just died, his beloved daughter
Angela whom he, Dr Ryan, had assisted into the world, even at the
height of her youth and health was temporary and insubstantial
because . . . people are insubstantial. They really do not last . . . They
never last.

(pp. 140–1)

Ryan sees clearly that the English will lose Ireland, and questions inter-
estingly whether they really want it. This is for him a political point –
in a negative way, he supports the Republican cause – but it is also part
of a more general process. He sees the body – the beauty of a ﬁne woman
‘like a ﬂaring match’ – as a machine in a perpetual state of entropic
decline.

Now this notion of entropic decline also includes the process of

recording history itself, which is a process of burial. While Brendan is
in Dublin, he just misses witnessing the shooting of an innocent
civilian, encountering the body of the old man at Northumberland
Road, shot on the canal bridge by an assassin disguised as a sandwich
man, who had asked him the time: ‘A gold watch, linked by a chain to
the top button of his waistcoat, still lay in the palm of his right hand
encircled by long ivory ﬁngernails’(p. 91). The pathos of this image is
related to the notion of a historical moment and the warmth and vital-
ity of the corpse, a pathos disturbed only by the prophetically monu-
mental ‘ivory’ of the ﬁngernails. As he moves away, Brendan is thinking,
after Lady Macbeth: ‘How new the blood of an old man looked! Not at
all faded, weary, desiccated like the man himself.’ And this prompts him
to watch for the entry of this event into ‘history’:

The Major read this newspaper account and the next day and the
next day found one or two more. But although it was mentioned in
passing once or twice, the murder of the old man had been classiﬁed
and accepted. It was odd, he thought. An old man is gunned down
in the street and within a couple of days this senseless act is both

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normal and inevitable. It was as if these newspaper articles were
poultices placed on sudden inﬂammations of violence. In a day or
two all the poison had been drawn out of them. They became
random events of the year 1919, inevitable, without malice, part of
history. The old man lying on the bridge with his watch in his hand
was a part of history.

(pp. 92–3)

History (so-called history) is made up of ‘events without malice’. The
text of Troubles is ironically scattered with newspaper reports, placed
there, not for ‘verisimilitude’ or ‘authenticity’, but for the opposite – to
make the reader witness the congealing process, the entropic decline of
full and living truth into dead narrative: conventional clichés, general-
ity, and ‘random events’ – things not seen or experienced by anyone.
The drawing of poison is equivalent for Brendan to the drawing of
substance.

This amounts, negatively, to a defence of ﬁction against recorded

history. Farrell saw his own writing as a struggle to resurrect life in the
corpse of language. During the early writing of The Siege of Krishnapur
he wrote:

Although I’ve written some forty pages, to me they are difﬁcult to
distinguish from forty corpses stretched beside my typewriter. Life is
not in them. I waste hours massaging their hearts and holding
mirrors over their mouths. From time to time I become convinced
that the mirror has clouded faintly. But the next time I look the thing
is as dead as ever. . . .’

Whatever consitutes the breath upon the mirror is the linguistic
equivalent to the ‘malice’ of events: style, metaphor, wit, when
successful, are true substance, momentary resistances against the
inexorable process of dying. Linguistic ‘poison’ – the sheer energy of
mis- or hallucinated perception arising momentarily in the ‘gloom’
beyond the ‘circle of light’ – gives life and truth to the language of the
ﬁctional text.

I think we are now in a position to confront one or two puzzles in
the criticism of Farrell’s work. I have been insisting on the hybridity of
his effects: that the impure combination of the grotesque, the humor-
ous and the uncanny, lies at the heart of his political critique of the
empire in his trilogy. But that also there is no mimetic parallel, easy or

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otherwise, between ‘history’ and the plots of Farrell’s novels, which
proceed by witty and decorative set pieces that are often static and
expository, variations on a theme of inertial endgame, not teleologically
structured forms that imitate the tragic or triumphant movement of
history, which has brought empire coherently (or even incoherently) to
an end. It is sometimes said that, as Binns puts it about Troubles: ‘The
case for change is made negatively, through the prejudice and irra-
tionality of the Anglo-Irish, and the Republican viewpoint is only
obliquely present in the novel.’

This might be said about all the

‘Others’ in the Trilogy – they are part of the ‘silence’ and the ‘gloom’,
not the ‘circle of light’. The same is true of both the Sepoys in The Siege
of Krishnapur and the Chinese, Indians, Malays and Japanese in The Sin-
gapore Grip. These masses are not realistically portrayed; they do not
have ‘viewpoints’ in a (democratic) process of representation of both
sides in a debate. These texts insist on the narcissism of the little ‘circle
of light’ and the entropic encroachment of the gloom and the silence.
This is the source of their negative sublime, their repeated exploitation
of peripheral vision.

Now that the biography of Farrell is published and available, we can see
more easily the substratum of connections between his ﬁrst three novels
and the Empire trilogy. Those early novels, in their agonized search for
a form, seek to come to terms with what happened to the author in life.
Farrell was born into what his biographer refers to as an ‘expatriate
void’.

His mother was Irish and lived in England, his father was

English, and after he had come back from India, went to live in Ireland.
Farrell spent his childhood in Ireland and then was brought over to
attend a prep. school at Jodrell Bank in the Cheshire Plain and then a
public school, Rossall, just outside Liverpool.

He was a handsome,

barrel-chested centre at rugby football. Struck down by polio during his
ﬁrst year at Oxford, he spent six months in an iron lung and almost
died. He became a skeleton. This process made him into a writer and a
profoundly self-conscious individual. He began to see that the personal
history he had taken for granted – that serene progress onwards and
upwards – was not the one he was now doomed to endure. There was
no ‘path’ to the future. He had suddenly entered a dark underworld:

Both the Slade Isolation Unit and the Wingﬁeld Morris Hospital were
situated near Brasenose, and it was impossible to forget that hedo-
nistic student life co-existed with a hellish underworld equipped with
instruments of exquisite torture.

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He kept a copy of Gray’s Anatomy to hand and talked of Beckett’s

Malone Dies. . . .

The tone of his early novel, The Lung (1965), is complex: it renders the
bitterness and sheer boredom, the despair disguised by jokes, and the
tormented narcissism of a young man faced with a kind of living death:
‘Away into the night and silence. But that was half the trouble. The
night was O.K. but what of the silence? The silence against which in
slow motion he was unable to avoid seeing the endlessly repeated ﬁlm
strip of his own, sad, sour thoughts.’

This is an exposure of the narcissism of the subject, as well as a gallows

satire on the poverty of the imagination. The knowledge of one’s own
non-existence is like a dark and empty cinema that lies behind – that
guarantees, so to speak – the poverty-stricken and repetitive ﬂickerings
of consciousness. Death forces that pathetic little ﬁlmstrip to go on
running on a kind of loop.

Farrell felt he had been robbed of his identity, and that he existed as

an inauthentic witness. He started reading Beckett, Camus and Sartre.
Time is contracted into space in this metaphor: biography, the history
of the self, is metonymically compressed into a form like a large
concentric building, as Boris, the protagonist of his third novel, A Girl
In The Head (1967), explains to his friend Alessandro, who, appropri-
ately, has already left:

You know, Sandro, I sometimes feel that I’m made up of a whole
series of antechambers with interconnecting doors leading by stages
towards my real self. You deal with almost everyone you meet in the
ﬁrst antechamber, the people you know well in the second or third
antechamber and so on . . . But something has gone wrong. I’ve never
been able to ﬁnd the person who can unlock those ﬁnal doors and
enter the room where I really am . . . the real me, sitting and waiting
in utter silence for someone to get to know me after all these futile
years of my life. . . .

Here the personal history of the individual is a maze-like building in
which the self is lost to others, and even, in a sense, to itself, sitting at
its own centre. Time is collapsed into a labyrinthine space which, in
this case, still bears traces of the (Victorian) ﬁction of maturity. Here it
is conﬁned to the futility of a personal biography, but this Kafka-esque
image bears a signiﬁcant relation to one of Farrell’s favourite metaphors
for larger historical process – the ruined building. The ‘Mayfair’, the

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decayed bungalow in The Singapore Grip, where Matthew catches his
glimpse of the giant thistles as ‘skeleton players’, was the name of the
hydrotherapy pool in the Slade Hospital:

In Mayfair, the blue-tiled hydrotherapy pool in the private wing, he
watched bleakly as the overweight female patient in front of him was
winched up out of the water, seeing her as a whale about to be
clubbed with a mallet and himself as a living skeleton.

The breaking down of Farrell’s body, and the consequent destruction of
his conﬁdence, coincided with the Suez crisis, and when the severely
damaged young man emerged from his hellish underworld in 1957, and
was able to look around, he realized the same process was occurring at
large in the history of his times:

The British national shock after Suez, overﬂowing into letters and
columns and radio discussions, affected Jim profoundly, and his own
predicament emphasised the historical shift. The red on the map,
commentators forecast, was going to shrink at accelerated speed, a
point conﬁrmed by Ghana’s independence and the proposal of a
European Common Market, signalled by the Treaty of Rome. The
abrupt downturn in British power coincided with his own personal
lost ground.

The biography makes it clear that, after this realization, Farrell collected
coincidences and correspondences between his own personal biography
and the collapse of empire. He was teaching English in a lycée in Toulon,
for example, when the French imperial adventure in Algeria collapsed;
the parallels with Ireland were not lost on him.

The Harkness Fellowship he won to the United States in 1966–7 was

the point at which he was able to convert biography into history. And
the ﬁnal inspiration for Troubles and the beginning of the Empire trilogy
was the discovery, while he was still partly at New Haven, of the ruins
of the gigantic, imperial-style Ocean View Hotel on Block Island, which
had burned down the previous July.

The Siege of Krishnapur begins with the picturesque device, culled from
countless nineteenth-century novels and redolent of Dickens, Hardy
and Forster, of the ‘hypothetical observer’. This European traveller,
moving like a ﬂy across the plains of Northern India, seeks relief in some
distant white walls which are clearly made of bricks, ‘because bricks are

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undoubtedly an essential ingredient of civilisation; one gets nowhere at
all without them.’

But this brisk assumption ironically blinds the

observer’s eyes:

There are no people to be seen. Everything lies perfectly still. Nearer
again, of course, he will see that it is not a town at all, but one of
those ancient cemeteries that are called ‘Cities of the Silent’, which
one occasionally comes across in Northern India. Perhaps a rare
traveller will turn off the road to rest in the shade of a mango grove
which separates the white tombs from a dilapidated mosque; some-
times one may ﬁnd incense left smouldering in an earthenware
saucer by an unseen hand. But otherwise there is no life here; even
the rustling leaves have a dead sound.

(p. 10)

This moment of misperception is the vehicle of a melancholy and
sublime meditation on the ruins of empire:

Krishnapur itself had once been the centre of civil administration for
a large district. At that time European bungalows had been built there
on a lavish scale, even small palaces standing in grounds of several
acres to house the Company representatives of the day who lived in
magniﬁcent style and sometimes even, in imitation of the native
princes, kept tigers and mistresses and heaven knows what else. But
then the importance of Krishnapur declined and these magniﬁcent
ofﬁcials moved elsewhere. Their splendid bungalows were left shut-
tered and empty; their gardens ran wild during the rainy season and
for the rest of the year dried up into deserts, over whose baked earth
whirlwinds of dust glided back and forth like ghostly dancers.

(p. 10)

The whole of this landscape is a metaphor for the stillness and silence
of death, in which dust is jerked mockingly into life by random gusts
of wind. These ‘ghostly dancers’ – ﬁctions inhabiting the ‘Cities of the
Silent’, metonymic heralds of the characters and plot of the novel to
come – play out their insubstantial actions like a phantasmagoria
against the terminal backdrop of baked earth.

This landscape is full of ‘sinister’ presences. The equivalent perspec-

tive to the ‘European traveller’ is the ingénue ﬁgure of idealist, George
Fleury, newly arrived at Krishnapur. George is invited to tea by Rayne,
the opium agent. Since Rayne’s bungalow is some way from his own

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residence, there is short-cut through a portion of jungle. Rayne has sent
his bearer to accompany Fleury. On their journey they discover a shrine,
which the bearer explains to Rayne is for ‘Lord Bhairava’, who is repre-
sented as ‘a small fat man with a black face and six arms’:

Lord Bhairava’s eyes were white in his black face and he appeared to
be looking at Fleury with malice and amusement. One of his six arms
held a trident, another a sword, another ﬂourished a severed forearm,
a fourth held a bowl, while a ﬁfth held a handful of skulls by the
hair: the faces of the skulls wore thin moustaches and expressions of
surprise. The sixth hand, empty, held up its three middle ﬁngers.
Peering closer, Fleury saw that people had left coins and food in the
bowl he was holding and more food had been smeared around his
chuckling lips, which were also daubed with crimson, as if with
blood. Fleury turned away quickly, chilled by this unexpected
encounter and anxious to leave this sinister garden without delay.

(pp. 54–5)

There is a trail of Gothic motifs which lead to this ironically presented
confrontation with the Other. The ‘worm-pocked skeleton’ of the ﬂag-
pole is an obvious memento mori, a reminder to the reader that all of
this scene – the presence of the Europeans in India, including that of
the character, Fleury himself – is already dead, a fragile imaginative
reconstruction. The geraniums have turned (through heat and neglect,
but this is not explained) into a ‘glaring, nightmarish growth’. Fleury’s
uncanny encounter with the animated watcher, the statue of Lord
Bhairava, is grotesque and comic in tone, as well as disturbing – it is
done indirectly through Fleury’s ignorance, and his narcissistic projec-
tion of alarm, as much as through an articulated reading of the signs.
The exact reading of those signs is left to the reader, who can easily go
as far as seeing that Fleury’s vampiric or cannibalistic fantasy – it is not
blood, but betel juice – is wrong; and yet is torn between regarding the
Lord Bhairava as a spiritual presence in an exalted state of indifference
to Europeans, and the suspicion that the local population are making a
gesture of reclamation, and even asking this aspect of Siva to bring
destruction to the British. The result disturbs; it is an ominous collu-
sion between reader and text, whose absurdity does not diminish, but
increases, its Gothic impact as a memento mori for a whole culture.

The self-conscious anachronism of the text – there are many points

at which we move in and out of the nineteenth century – is tied to
repeated acts of morbid animation:

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He thought again of those hundred and ﬁfty million people living
in cruel poverty in India alone . . .Would Science and Political
Economy ever be powerful enough to give them a life of ease and
respectability? He no longer believed that they would. If they did, it
would not be in his own century, but in some future era. This notion
of the superiority of the nineteenth century which he had just been
enjoying had depended on beliefs he no longer held, but which had
just now been itching, like amputated limbs which he could feel
although they no longer existed.

(p. 200)

The suddenness of the ‘amputation’ leaves the past moment still
apparently twitching in the present. The reader is placed in an interest-
ing position here, imagining the loss of Victorian optimism – the belief
in progress – as a ‘ghostly’ physiological illusion, a metaphor for a kind
of historical uncanny (Fleury suddenly is made, momentarily, in a slip
of historical paradigm, to sense his own ‘modernity’) that is derived from
the idea of a gap in reality caused by a delusion of the senses.

The whole culture of the Victorians is reduced to technology, its

emblem of progress, in the shape of the contents of the Great
Exhibition, and then inverted into a barbaric, but grotesquely domes-
tic engine of slaughter. The technique is deliberately static. The comic
set piece allows us to glimpse the universe of death, the silence and
stillness which has been pressing through all along, amongst a shower
of teaspoons:

He peered over the parapet. Below nothing was moving, but there
appeared to be a carpet of dead bodies. But then he realized that
many of these bodies were indeed moving, but not very much. A
sepoy here was trying to remove a silver fork from one of his lungs,
another had received a piece of lightning conductor in his kidneys.
A sepoy with a green turban had had his spine shattered by The Spirit
of Science; others had been struck down by teaspoons, by ﬁsh-knives,
by marbles; an unfortunate subadar had been plucked from this world
by the silver sugar-tongs embedded in his brain. A heart-breaking
wail now rose from those who had not been killed outright.

(p. 289)

This is mock-heroic satire, a curiously miniaturized picture of slaughter;
technically, it is a list, which works by repetition and rhetorical varia-

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tion. Again it expands a single moment, miming the adjustment of
perception – the sheer amazement and then the reading of the signs –
after the event. Tonally, there is an interesting contrast between the
resolutely cheerful ‘plucked from this world’, and the ‘heart-breaking
wail’ (whose heart is ready to break: the Collector’s? the reader’s?) of the
wounded, which injects an awful pathos into the grotesquerie.

At the end of the siege, when the remaining Europeans are ﬁghting

hand-to-hand and retreating from room to room of the old Residency,
the Collector ﬁnds himself jammed in one of the doorways, like a tube-
train passenger, with a crowd of corpses, ‘a few inches from his nose the
face of a dead sepoy grinned at him with sparkling teeth . . . so close
that he could smell the perfume of patchouli on the corpse’s moustache’
(p. 295). Tactically, he needs to stay there and not retreat too quickly.
One can’t get closer than this to the malice of events. A page later, in
an absurdly embarassing comic moment, the whole action is repeated
and the mordant joke is reanimated:

Again there was a sharp skirmish at the door. Soon the bodies began
to pile up here, too; and yet again the Collector and his men had to
put their shoulders to the carnal barricade to prevent it from being
ejected into the hall; and yet again, as if in a dream, the Collector
found his face an inch from that of an amused sepoy and thought:
‘It surely can’t be the same man!’ for from this corpse’s moustache
there was also a scent of patchouli. But the Collector had no time to
worry about the locomotion of corpses. . . .

(p. 296)

The macabre nature of these set-piece jokes is purely Gothic and
impurely farcical: all corpses look alike, and they are all equally amused
at one’s efforts in life. It is perfectly possible to confuse the identity of
one with another, no matter who they are. In this respect, for the
Collector, they are just like sepoys, all of whom (confusingly, for him)
seem to wear patchouli oil.

The end of the novel is a case of peripheral vision. When the siege is

ﬁnally lifted, the relievers and the survivors stare at one another across
the parapet, unable to believe their eyes. The latter stare at Lieutenant
Stapleton ‘as you might stare at orange rats trying to get into bed with
you’ (p. 308); while the coarsely ambitious commanding ofﬁcer of the
relief force, the Lieutenant’s uncle, General Sinclair, perfectly blind
to any form of uncanny resemblance, thinks he has ‘never seen

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Englishmen get themselves into such a state before; they looked more
like untouchables’ (p. 309).

What I have been arguing above is a simple case for the links between

Farrell’s writing and a Gothic inﬂection of the sublime. This Danse
Macabre is strikingly present in the opening scene of his last, unﬁnished
novel, The Hill Station (1981), in which the egregious Mr Lowrie scans
the people getting off the train at Kalka, on their way up to Simla: ‘Poor
ghosts! They gathered here under Mr Lowrie’s sparkling eye, as on the
bank of a dark river, waiting to be ferried to the other side. With
practice Mr Lowrie had grown skilful at telling which of them would
not return’ (p. 24). Lowrie is the ferryman, and Simla the Elysian Fields
to which they hope (in vain) to ascend. Lowrie seeks instead to divert
them into the cemetery. The ﬁgurative pattern, stopping just short of
allegory, is a continuous one: its moments of peripheral vision link,
quite self-consciously, Farrell’s comic tone to his theme of entropic
decline; the insubstantiality of the body and illusory, death-driven
nature of imperial culture. My point is quite compatible with Ehren-
dorf’s famous ‘Second Law’ in The Singapore Grip: ‘Things are slightly
worse at any given moment than at any preceding moment’(p. 295);
but it suggests that this formula describes, not just the march of history,
but the march of oblivion too.

Notes

1. J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip (Fontana: London, 1979), p. 112. All subse-

quent quotations are taken from this edition. Page references will be given
in the text in parentheses.

2. See Lavinia Greacen, J.G. Farrell: the Making of a Writer (Bloomsbury: London,

1999), p. 353. The reviewer was Timothy Mo, in the New Statesman. For the
picture of Farrell’s growing maturity and its link to an increase in realism,
see John Spurling’s formulation: ‘Farrell’s new ability to inhabit more and
more of his characters . . . was accompanied by a new skill in matching the
inner and outer actions of the story. There is no outer world in The Lung or
A Girl in the Head, only ﬂashbacks to Sands’s and Boris’s pasts. In Troubles
the outer world is either deliberately shadowy or conveyed rather too crudely
by the bald insertion of paragraphs from contemporary newspapers. In
Krishnapur and Singapore the outer world and Farrell’s ﬁctional world coa-
lesce. In Singapore especially – a triumph of the imagination in which there
is a ﬁctional assimilation of massive amounts of documentary material – one
feels that for the ﬁrst time Farrell has arrived exactly where he wants to be.
Now he is telling not just a story, but history itself, from inside and outside.’
See John Spurling, ‘As Does The Bishop’, in J.G. Farrell, The Hill Station, ed.
J. Spurling (London: Fontana, 1982), p. 167. All subsequent references to The

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Hill Station are taken from this edition. Page numbers will appear in paren-
theses in the text.

3. R.G. Binns, J.G. Farrell (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 60. For the presence of

Lukács in the argument about the genre, see pp. 14–15.

4. See W.J. McCormack’s account of Bowen, in Dissolute Characters (Manches-

ter: Manchester University Press, 1993); J. Moynahan, The Anglo-Irish Liter-
ary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995); and, for the historical connection between the Anglo-Irish and
the occult, see Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1997), Chapter 11, ‘Protestant Magic: W.B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish
History’.

5. Cf. the following: ‘Cleve either felt or fancied, seeing, as the Italians say, with

the tail of his eye, that she was now, for a moment, looking at him, believ-
ing herself unseen’: J.S. Le Fanu, The Tenants of Malory, 2nd edn (London:
Bentley, 1868), p. 50. This example preserves the young man’s narcissism, as
he sees a girl in a chapel who looks uncannily like Guido’s portrait of Beat-
rice Cenci. M.R. James also uses this phrase (without reference to the Ital-
ians) to describe an uncanny moment in which the subject is being watched:
‘It began when I was ﬁrst prospecting, and put me off again and again. There
was always somebody – a man – standing by one of the ﬁrs. This was in day-
light, you know. He was never in front of me. I always saw him with the tail
of my eye on the left or the right, and he was never there when I looked
straight for him. . . .’ (‘A Warning to the Curious’, Collected Ghost Stories
(Ware: Wordsworth, 1992), p. 313.

6. For a discussion of misperception in Ann Radcliffe, see Victor Sage, ‘The Epis-

temology of Error: Reading and Isolation in The Mysteries of Udolpho’,
Q/W/E/R/T/Y 6 (October 1996), 107–13.

7. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. David Daiches (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1982), p. 47.

8. J.G. Farrell, Troubles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 94. All subsequent

quotations are taken from this edition. Page references will be given in the
text in parentheses.

9. Greacen, J.G. Farrell, p. 276.

10. Binns, J.G. Farrell, p. 52.
11. Greacen, J.G. Farrell, p. 104.
12. The prep. school’s rambling buildings housed a reputed ghost, nicknamed

‘Count Jodrell’ by the boys. See Greacen, J.G. Farrell, p. 30.

13. Ibid., p. 107.
14. J.G. Farrell, The Lung (London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 43.
15. J.G. Farrell, A Girl in the Head (London: Cape, 1967), p. 207.
16. Greacen, J.G. Farrell, p. 92.
17. Ibid., p. 102.
18. Ibid., p. 145.
19. ‘In its heyday, equipped with a sumptuous ballroom and the world’s longest

bar boasting 101 stools, the Ocean View had been known as the Queen of
the Atlantic Coast. The loyal clientele had included President Ulysses S.
Grant and the Vanderbilts; and with so many judges, company presidents,
and politicians in summer residence, a telegraphic link to the New York Stock
Exchange had been installed. The hotel had even held a session of the US

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supreme Court’: ibid., p. 224. The ruins of this hotel, which formed a sudden
vision of the Majestic, exhilarated him.

20. J.G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur ([1973], London: Orion, n.d.), pp. 9–10.

All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Page references will
be given in parentheses in the text.

21. Cf. the following: ‘The traditions of the Bhairava Tantras are Kapalika, the

basic form of their ascetic observance being that of the skull . . . Worshipped
within an enclosure of cremation grounds they themselves wear the bone
ornaments and brandish the skull-staff of the Kapalika tradition . . . Though
the Svacchandatantra, which is the authority for this cult, teaches the worship
of certain secondary forms of Svacchandabhairava such as Kotaraksa (‘the
Hollow-Eyed’) and Vyadhibhaksa (‘the Devourer of Diseases’), which being
visualised as terrifying, gross-bodied and black, are close to the standard
Bhairavas of the Kapalika tradition, Svacchandabhairava himself, the deity
of daily worship, has milder elements that make him transitional in type
between the calm Sadasiva of the Saiva Siddhanta and the gods of the
Kapalika mainstream. Stewart Sutherland, Leslie Houlden, Peter Clarke, and
Friedhelm Hardy, eds, The World’s Religions (London: Routledge, 1988), pp.
670–1. The problem for the reader is: is this Lord Bhairava of the ‘standard’,
or ‘transitional’ type? To answer this question, it would seem we have to put
ourselves outside the symbolism of the European ‘Gothic’. And yet, if it is
of the ‘standard’ Kapalika type, then the ‘skull beneath the skin’ is essential
to it and it is a kind of Tantric Danse Macabre. If it is a ‘transitional’ type,
then it is more likely to be an emblem of calmness and perhaps indifference
to mortality, and is perhaps less ominous in itself. One could even regard
both types as purely ‘homeopathic’, but there is an element of homeopathy,
of course, in the European memento mori tradition. But the question still
arises: has the statue been placed there as the cultural equivalent of a ‘rever-
sion to nature’ in the ﬂagpole and the geraniums? And the answer seems to
be yes, and Fleury’s ingénue alarm is vindicated at another level.

There is a passage in Farrell’s ‘Indian Diary’, which shows that he gave

to Fleury what had been his own misperception in this case: ‘I see things
without understanding them. It took me ages to realize that what appeared
to be splashes of blood all over the pavements of Bombay was merely people
spitting betel juice’ (The Hill Station, p. 211). He records seeing a ‘Bhairava
erect in metal’(p. 245) in the National Museum of Calcutta. He frequently
castigates himself in the diary for not noticing, or for not seeing, things. For
example, in Agra: ‘While waiting for the tourists to arrive on the Taj Express
from Delhi so that the bus would ﬁll up and go, I sat in a little park. On a
lawn a few feet away a ﬁgure wrapped in some canvas was lying, one bare
brown foot protruded. It was early morning. He had evidently slept there
(after dark in winter it must be cold). What I suddenly realized was that I
hadn’t noticed him. I’d seen him, been vaguely aware of the fact that there
was someone there, and discarded the matter as not sufﬁciently interesting
to think about consciously’ (p. 215). The unexpected presence of the statue
in this scene may derive from a mysterious incident at Lucknow. Farrell com-
ments on a bagpipe band he watches at the Carlton Hotel, and his mind
goes back to an earlier incident: ‘It resembled the Sunday afternoon affair I
saw in Jaipur when I glimpsed the lady with four arms standing in the shrub-

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bery. Thinking of that incident, why didn’t I stop and look more closely?’
(p. 228). It is interesting to see how these moments of mis- or underpercep-
tion, which are a mixture of writerly self-castigation for wasting an oppor-
tunity to observe, and a feeling that it is his moral and political duty to be
sharply aware of poverty, despite its ubiquitousness, are handed on to Fleury,
and become ‘sinister’ in this episode in the novel, whereas in the diary they
are not so.

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Arundhati Roy and the
House of History

David Punter

192

Perhaps the most signiﬁcant and enduring problem in postcolonial criti-
cism is that the use of the term ‘postcolonial’ has an inevitably dis-
torting effect. This is in one sense inevitable in that the postcolonial
world itself is distorted; not, of course, in the sense of having been
twisted away from some recognizable master-trajectory or severed from
some putative condition of origin, but in deeper senses to do with obfus-
cations of desire, impossible hybridities, the haunting ineradicability of
paths not taken.

But it is also inevitable in the sense that the very use

of the ‘postcolonial’ label immediately places each text, each discourse,
each representation under a speciﬁc sign.

That sign is at the same time ludicrously over-speciﬁc and fatally over-

general. The over-speciﬁcity lies in the invalid claim that any text can
be viewed within such a totalizing frame; the writings of Salman
Rushdie, Amos Tutuola, Derek Walcott are characterized by a set of
obliquities, an uncontainable excess that automatically propels them
beyond the reach of any such label. The over-generalization lies in the
dismissal of difference, the smoothing over of the myriad different
fragments of history and geography that ‘construct’ the ‘postcolonial
world’; or, we might better say, that construct the world as postcolonial.

The term ‘Gothic’, of course, suffers from – and is constructed by –

its own parallel problems. It would be unnecessary – and indeed impos-
sible – here to rehearse the vicissitudes of the notion of Gothic through
history; sufﬁce it to say, however, that there are signiﬁcant questions
that need to be addressed in any attempt to use the term in a post-
colonial context, precisely because its referents are to a particular,
complex, refracted version of European history.

Even, however, as

one says this, it becomes immediately obvious with what alarming
frequency the Gothic has called into being its own Other; its very

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‘European-ness’, even its ‘euromanticism’, its embroilment in shifting
boundaries, migratory ﬂights, feudal points of order, strongholds of
reason falling in a relentless series to the approach of the barbarians. It
is precisely this that produced the American Gothic tradition from
Brockden Brown on; just as more recently it has answered, or been
answered by, a call from within the postcolonial, whether one thinks
of the crazed and labyrinthine intricacies of Rushdie’s architectures or
of the introspective and claustrophobic worlds of Margaret Atwood.

One way of approaching the interfaces of these issues would be by

beginning from the supposition that Gothic represents a speciﬁc view
of history. One might refer to this view as an ‘expressionistic’ one, a
view that abandons minutiae and details in favour of the grand gesture,
the melodrama of rise and fall, a view in which terror and pity are the
moving forces; but it would also be a more troubling view, for it would
have also to deal with the impossibility of escape from history, with the
recurrent sense in Gothic ﬁction that the past can never be left behind,
that it will reappear and exact a necessary price.

We might refer to this, then, as history written according to a certain

logic: a logic of the phantom, the revenant, a logic of haunting, and it
is here that the connection with the postcolonial comes most clearly
into view. The very structure of the term ‘postcolonial’ itself, its appar-
ent insistence on a time ‘after’, on an ‘aftermath’, exposes itself precisely
to the threat of return, falls under the sign of repetition. One of the
most obvious texts here would be Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), with
its agonizing insistence on the implacability of trauma, its refusal to re-
view the past as something that is over and done with. The past, on this
view of history, is right in our midst: hence also, of course, contempo-
rary debates around cultural and racial blame and apology, hence the
nature of recriminations and restitutions, hence the insistence on the
memorial, the monument to suffering, even though the only form such
a monument can or should take is the form of a ruin.

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) grounds itself, I would

claim, on some such view of history, and this is emblematized, as in
classic Gothic ﬁction, in the form of the house; but here there are three
houses, complexly intertwined with each other, three loci which are
inseparable one from another and which at the same time bind together
the disparate threads of history and chronology. The ﬁrst of these is the
house in Ayemenem where the remains of the Kochamma family, the
shattered family at the heart of the narrative, live; or have lived, at
various stages of the past and in various conditions of dissolution and
decay. It would be difﬁcult to miss the Gothic resonance: ‘Filth had laid

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siege to the Ayemenem house like a medieval army advancing on an
enemy castle. It clotted every crevice and clung to the windowpanes.
Midges whizzed in teapots. Dead insects lay in empty vases.’

There is, however, a second house, ‘on the other side of the river’ (p.

52). Just as the ‘Ayemenem house’ had once been a ‘grand old house’
(p. 165), so this second house, now empty, owns to a complex past
history. It is the house which used to belong to the ‘Black Sahib’, the
‘Englishman who had “gone native” ’ and who had ‘shot himself
through the head ten years ago when his young lover’s parents had
taken the boy away from him and sent him to school’ (p. 52). Still tied
up in litigation between the white man’s secretary and his cook, the
house lies empty, across the river from the Ayemenem house; it will,
however, be the scene of the novel’s terrible denouement.

But these two houses are haunted by a third house, the metaphorical

house (although Estha and Rahel, the twins at the centre of the narra-
tive, interpret it literally) described by their uncle Chacko:

He explained to them that history was like an old house at night.
With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside.

‘To understand history’, Chacko said, ‘we have to go inside and

listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures
on the wall. And smell the smells . . . But we can’t go in’, Chacko
explained, ‘because we’ve been locked out’.

(pp. 52–3)

He then goes on to explain how this has come to be, how it is that India
has been excluded from the historical process, turned into a ghost on
the very terrain of its own land.

From the very beginning, then, The

God of Small Things is a narrative of the impossible. It seeks to tell a story
while reminding us that the story cannot be told: hence the fragmen-
tary nature of the narrative, its violent temporal shifts and lapses, hence
the sense that it is always haunted by other stories that have been more
or less forcibly suppressed. Within this environment of radical home-
lessness it is possible to sense the decay and collapse of all three of these
houses: none are capable of providing shelter, any more than the Gothic
castle, despite the sternness of its walls, the remoteness of its location,
can provide succour or distinguish containment from incarceration.

The Black Sahib, we are told, chose Ayemenem – or perhaps it chose

him – as ‘his private Heart of Darkness’ (p. 52), and throughout the text
this epithet is transferred to the house which was his but which has
become, by the time of the present of the novel and after the time of

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disaster, a hotel. What, we might ask, would be the most appropriate
name for such a hotel, a place constructed from death, violence and
imperial exploitation? It is, obviously, the Hotel Heritage, which here
effortlessly and phantomatically occupies the same space as the heart
of darkness; ‘heritage’, indeed, becomes the ‘heart of darkness’, the very
means of obscuring history from sight, the false and crazy monstrosity
erected on the site of the colonial, the ediﬁce of denial.

Kari Saipu, the Black Sahib, is now of course a ghost. Furthermore, he

is a dead ghost: we know that because his ghost has been killed, ‘pinned
. . . to the trunk of a rubber tree, where . . . it still remained. A sickled
smell, that bled clear, amber blood, and begged for cigars’ (p. 199). If
only it were possible to deal with history so simply, so conclusively, to
lay the joint ghost of empire and paedophilia with a single stroke, and
thereby to allow for a coming to independence, a growth towards
freedom, unimpeded by the spectres of the past.

But the spectres return and multiply. There are, for example, the

ghosts of lost objects, like those that populate the room of the boy-twin
Estha, whose life and memory have been ruined by trauma:

The terrible ghosts of impossible-to-forget toys clustered on the
blades of the ceiling fan. A catapult. A Qantas’ koala (from Miss
Mitten) with loosened button eyes. An inﬂatable goose (that had
been burst with a policeman’s cigarette). Two ballpoint pens with
silent streetscapes and red London buses that ﬂoated up and down
in them.

(p. 91)

These are ghosts that were all present as silent witnesses to the terrible
denouement of the novel, the police attack on the Untouchable,
Velutha, whose punishment for an affair with the twins’ mother Ammu
constitutes the text’s ﬁnal tragedy; the toys represent again the impos-
sibility of a complete telling of history and therefore signify a different
kind of exclusion from the history house. There is the exclusion that is
a direct consequence of imperial rule; there is the further exclusion,
nuanced always by discursive power, that is a function of representa-
tion itself, the impossibility of gathering together the evidence on
which any ‘true’ account might be based.

In the face of these exclusions, the texture of the narrative becomes

riddled and shot through with secrets: this room, for example, ‘had kept
its secrets. It gave nothing away’ (p. 91). Just so Velutha himself becomes
a ghost, but in at least a redoubled way. Ghosted in his lifetime by the

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customary invisibility that is the inevitable corollary to the status of the
‘untouchable’, he is ghosted again in representational terms by those
who remain unaware of the part he has played in the story – by Chacko’s
English ex-wife Margaret, for example:

Strangely, the person that Margaret Kochamma never thought about
was Velutha. Of him she had no memory at all. Not even what he
looked like.

Perhaps this was because she never really knew him, nor ever heard

what happened to him. . . . He left no footprints in sand, no ripples
in water, no image in mirrors.

(pp. 264–5)

Like any Gothic text, then, The God of Small Things attempts to tell an
impossible tale, to sew together a thing of shreds and fragments, a mon-
strous creation that is also vampiric in that it can ﬁnd no reﬂection of
itself. Opposed to this in the text – but therefore also contained within
it, subverted by the radical inadequacy of story – is the dance of
Kathakali, the traditional re-enactment of legend and myth, and here
secrets recur in a different guise:

It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because Kathakali discov-
ered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no
secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to
hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfort-
ably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They
don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the
house you live in.

(p. 229)

The familiar, then, as opposed to the unfamiliarity of the three houses,
their symbolization of death, ruin, decay; a house to live in as opposed
to a house to die in, a house from which the monsters of empire, of
caste, of touch and the loss of touch have been banished, a ﬁction of
completeness and of an unbroken chain of history which will bind
together rather than act as a dragging weight – such as might be carried
by, for example, a tethered ghost.

Where, then, do these monsters originate, by what forces and prog-

enitors is it possible to be exiled from one’s own history? One such
origin lies in Pappachi, the patriarch of the Kochamma family, who ‘had
been an Imperial Entomologist’ (p. 48). In his subordination to imper-

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ial norms (‘Until the day he died, even in the stiﬂing Ayemenem heat,
every single day, Pappachi wore a well-pressed three-piece suit and his
gold pocket watch’, p. 49) and in the disappointment that has accom-
panied and overshadowed his career (his one discovery, a rare moth,
being named after somebody else), Pappachi preﬁgures the doom of his
entire family, torn between anglophilia and caste bigotry. His secret, his
frustration, his desire; his wife-beating; Pappachi is an exile in his own
house, visiting his inner violence down the chain as the policemen who
beat Velutha express their detestation of contamination by an Untouch-
able by breaking his bones.

But in another sense, monsters have no origins; or rather, they are

necessarily if phantasmagorically extruded from the very material of the
social structure. When Velutha’s own father, Vellya Paapen, tells the
secret that will lead to his son’s destruction and to a wider chaos, in his
view it is Velutha who is the monster, a monster for having ‘spawned’,
from whom he asks ‘God’s forgiveness’: ‘he offered to kill his son with
his own bare hands. To destroy what he had created’ (p. 78). But in truth
the monstrosity, the generation of monsters, is beyond control; whether
within the history house or outside it, a general process of monstrosity
is at work, sometimes in secret, sometimes in full view, sometimes
haunting the margins of the text, the borderlands between Ayemenem
and the outside world.

Even Chacko, the genial, ineffectual Chacko, who has been a Rhodes

scholar at Oxford and who has ‘returned’ rootless, homeless, placeless,
his marriage wrecked, his location in history shattered, and who has, at
least, stopped his father from beating his mother (albeit at the cost
of a lifelong silence between father and son), even Chacko, in the
aftermath of the discovery of his sister Ammu’s affair with Velutha,
succumbs. He it is who orders Ammu, with her daughter, the girl-twin
Rahel, to leave Ayemenem.

Pack your things and leave, Chacko had said. Stepping over a broken
door. A handle in his hand. And Ammu, though her hands were
trembling, hadn’t looked up from her unnecessary hemming. A tin
of ribbons lay open on her lap.

But Rahel had. Looked up. And seen that Chacko had disappeared

and left a monster in his place.

(p. 302)

The troubling, then, of the line, the ‘shadow-line’,

between the

human and the monstrous becomes one of the (monstrous) subtexts

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of The God of Small Things; there are no exceptions, no exemptions
from this inexorable logic. Just as in Frankenstein we might say that
the monstrousness of the scientist’s ambitions achieve little more
than the construction of a massive projection, a new housing for
his own social alienation, so here a different kind of attempt at
domination ripples through the social fabric, distorting everything
with which it comes into contact. The policemen who attack Velutha
may be acting out an ancient caste vengeance; but at the same
time, and inextricably, they are wearing the uniforms of the colonial
masters.

The twins, Estha and Rahel, ﬁgure in the text as the consequences of

this process of continuous damage. Estha is forced to betray Velutha,
and is thus in some sense responsible for the violence; Rahel feels in
her own way responsible for the other great tragedy of the text, the
drowning of Sophie Mol, Chacko and Margaret’s daughter. For Estha,
the consequence is a lifetime of silence; for Rahel, an utter inner empti-
ness that reduces her to the condition of an automaton. But as always
in the text, the origins of trauma are over-determined. Estha, for
example, has an encounter with a soft-drink salesman who forces him
into a sexual act, an act that makes him physically sick. But the reason
why it is Estha who is subjected to this ordeal appears inseparable from
his position as the son of an anglophile family; it is the English songs
he is singing that ﬁrst catch the salesman’s attention, the oddities of his
English pronunciation that permit a disastrous prolongation of their
conversation.

The entire novel, then, can be seen as a painful exploration of the

hidden roots of trauma, but the results of this exploration can never be
submitted to a single interpretation. What can be said is that they are
inextricably involved with the nature of taboo, and that this taboo is
symbolized in Sophie Mol, child of an Indian father and a white mother;
Sophie Mol, of whom Rahel poignantly says, ‘If she gets dirty she’ll die’
(p. 210). It could indeed be said that this is precisely what happens: by
‘returning’ (a crucial term applied to almost all of the main characters
in the text at one point or another) she submits herself to the preor-
dained contamination of Ayemenem, its history and its secrets, but
against these she has no means of inoculation.

She was taller than Estha. And bigger. Her eyes were bluegreyblue.
Her pale skin was the colour of beach sand. But her hatted hair was
beautiful, deep red-brown. And yes (oh yes!) she had Pappachi’s nose

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waiting inside hers. An Imperial Entomologist’s nose-within-a-nose.
A moth-lover’s nose. She carried her Made-in-England go-go bag that
she loved.

(p. 143)

In her very being, Sophie Mol crosses boundaries, as, in a different way,
does Velutha, and for them there can therefore be no mercy. Their fates
are not in the hands of individuals; rather, they fall victim, like the
Gothic heroine, to a war-machine, an apparatus of terror that has no
regard for individual subjectivity, that grinds on regardless.

Perhaps the most troubling scene in the text is the one where, after

years of enforced separation, Estha and Rahel meet again (again they
‘return’, again they are revenants) and, it would appear, silently make
love. The intolerable grief of this scene derives not only from the trau-
matic events of the past, nor from our knowledge that there is no
remedy for such events; it derives from the hopeless plangency of such
an attempt to make whole again that which has been brutally severed,
whether it is the twins themselves, torn apart in the wake of the tragic
events of Ayemenem, or the fragments of story dispersed to the four
winds, or the fate of an entire culture cut off from self-knowledge by
the violent imposition of a different set of rules. The ﬁguration of the
fantasy of wholeness as incest underscores the impossibility of moving
forward into free, independent relationships while the entire apparatus
of caste and empire binds and forbids at every move.

In the end the events of Ayemenem – the death of Sophie Mol; the

beating of Velutha; the banishing of Ammu for her relationship with
Velutha; the forced separation of the twins, who are seen as respon-
sible for Sophie Mol’s death – become too great, too fearful to be referred
to in detail any more; history draws a shroud down over them, and they
are known only as ‘the Terror’. The establishment of the Heritage Hotel
suggests a way of encountering and trying to deal with this Terror (by
converting the raw meat and blood of history into something cooked
and sanitized):

The back verandah of the History House (where a posse of Touchable
policemen converged, where an inﬂatable goose was burst) had been
enclosed and converted into the airy hotel kitchen. Nothing worse
than kebabs and caramel custard happened there now. The Terror
was past. Overcome by the smell of food. Silenced by the humming
of cooks. The cheerful chop-chop-chopping of ginger and garlic. The

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disembowelling of lesser mammals – pigs, goats. The dicing of meat.
The scaling of ﬁsh.

(p. 127)

But the Terror, of course, has crept, as it does in the Gothic, into the
very language itself. Chopping, disembowelling: in the context of the
past events which are interlaced with this vision of a ‘cured’ present,
these words shift and change, they create memories, they reminisce,
they do not cover over the past but bestow on it a fateful persistence,
like the words that Estha, trapped in his traumatized silence, can no
longer pronounce. When asked whether he had been kidnapped by
Velutha, it was he who, under the severest of pressures from his rela-
tives, said ‘Yes’; and since he uttered that one lie, a lie that permitted
the attack on Velutha to go unpunished, no other words have passed
his lips.

The Terror, then, seen from one aspect is a terror of being sealed

in; of being locked into a version of history that one knows to be a lie,
of being unable to utter – or perhaps even remember – the words that
might set it right. Chacko has sought to escape this fate through words:
he is liable to come up with classical English quotations at the least
provocation. But these words are impotent; they do not have the
power to change anything, least of all Chacko’s own fate as a variously
displaced person. His words, we might say, are uttered only outside
the closed windows of the History House; therefore they have no pur-
chase on the charmed circle within, they have no reverberation, no
echo.

But the Terror is not only that which lies in the withholding of words,

that which stuns into a lifelong silence; it is also that which inexorably
propels words out, words that will result in violence and tragedy. The
words, for example, of Velutha’s father, Vellya Paapen:

Then the Terror took hold of him and shook the words out of him.
He told Mammachi what he had seen. The story of the little boat
that crossed the river night after night, and who was in it. The story
of a man and woman, standing together in the moonlight. Skin to
skin.

(p. 255)

Silence is no remedy, but neither is the telling of a story. ‘The Terror’
here combines two associations. On the one hand, it stands for Vellya
Paapen’s own terror at having witnessed an association between an

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Untouchable – his own son – and Ammu, a Touchable; on the other, it
stands for the inexorable power of story itself, as though what moves
Vellya Paapen to words is not some subjective desire or wish but rather
an objective necessity that ensures that what must be told is told. Thus
the terror in some sense becomes narrative itself, implicated in an
impossible knot of impotence and power; in a very literal way, here
Vellya Paapen’s words are not his own, just as Estha will spend the rest
of his life in an attempt to demonstrate that the word ‘Yes’ was not his,
that he would prefer to be incapable of any utterance at all than to own
to the consequences of the one word he spoke.

At this point, perhaps it is necessary to think again about the Gothic.

In The God of Small Things, we can readily ﬁnd a repertoire of ghosts,
monsters and haunted houses; and we can ﬁnd these linked at many
points – although never exclusively – with issues to do with the after-
math of imperial rule. But this is never a matter of simple ascription. It
is, rather, a question of reinscription, or of superinscription: a matter of
codes of practice, of behaviour, of representation, being read differently.
The Terror in which we ﬁnd ourselves in The God of Small Things is a
terror of redoubled incomprehension; the terror of being inside a situ-
ation where the very means for getting our bearings have been whittled
away, where they have been partly supplanted by the superimposition
of an uncompleted project. Yet this goes through a further turn of the
circle: for what is revealed in this baleful light is the incompleteness of
all narrative, the dark underside of the (incestuous?) pretence of whole-
ness that governs conventional narrative expectation.

Gothic proliferates, it constantly exceeds the boundaries allotted

to it; just so, the fate of the postcolonial is constantly to resist attempts
at deﬁnition, at categorization. Gothic operates, as various critics have
pointed out, beyond the law

– or at least it gestures towards the

possibility of such operation; in the realm of the postcolonial – whether
this be a geographical construct, a historical moment or a mode of
reading and interpretation – there are also doubts about the law, and
about the pretensions to stability which it claims to incorporate.

Thus the discourse about taboo in The God of Small Things moves
towards a discourse of the law, and in particular of what Roy refers to
as the ‘Love Laws’; and it does so particularly in the ambiguous scene
in which – perhaps – Estha and Rahel’s tragic love for each other is
consummated:

There is very little that anyone could say to clarify what happened
next . . . Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and

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Emptiness ﬁtted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a
snufﬂing in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a
hard honey-coloured shoulder had a semi-circle of teethmarks on it.
Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that
what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief.

Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down

who should be loved. And how. And how much.

(p. 328)

That, the beast-men in The Island of Doctor Moreau chant, is the law.

They chant it because they have been forced to; because it is, they
have been told, what separates them from the animal, from all that lies
on the ‘other side’. But what if the law has a very different function
from that? What if the law exists – as an anthropological deﬁnition
would suggest – to prevent a certain haunting, to keep the ghosts of
forest, desert, jungle where they ‘belong’? What if it exists to keep them
from emerging and reminding us of all we have lost; from reminding us
of the god of loss – who, according to the text, is also the ‘god of small
things’, the god who respects no master-narratives but is present only in
the most intimate of exchanges, the most loving moments in a lover’s
discourse?

Contravention of the law is unforgivable. For Margaret, marrying an

Indian, becoming the mother of Sophie Mol, there is not one death to
be endured but two: ﬁrst the death of her second husband – to recover
from which she has brought Sophie Mol to Ayemenem in the ﬁrst place
– and then Sophie Mol’s own death. An uncanny repetition plays itself
out down the line, and rouses the voices of the ghosts: ‘When Margaret
Kochamma saw her little daughter’s body, shock swelled in her like
phantom applause in an empty auditorium’ (p. 263). How Margaret
deals with these deaths, we do not know: but we do know how Estha
and Rahel deal with their part, the complex layers of denial that come
to cover over and usurp their personalities – a denial that begins as early
as Sophie Mol’s funeral:

When they lowered Sophie Mol’s cofﬁn into the ground in the little
cemetery behind the church, Rahel knew that she still wasn’t dead.
She heard (on Sophie Mol’s behalf), the softsounds of the red mud
and the hardsounds of the orange laterite that spoiled the shining
cofﬁn polish. She heard the dull thudding through the polished
cofﬁn wood, through the satin cofﬁn lining. . . . Inside the earth

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Sophie Mol screamed, and shredded satin with her teeth. But you
can’t hear screams through earth and stone.

Sophie Mol died because she couldn’t breathe.

(p. 7)

It is necessary, then, to build a story, a different story, what I have referred
to elsewhere as a ‘text instead’;

in this case the necessity derives from

the terror. There must be another story in terms of which our own
agency, Rahel’s agency, can be denied, a story that will ﬁx events in a
trajectory of destiny for which we need never feel responsible.

It is also, perhaps, necessary to build a story – as one might, for

example, build a house – in which death can have a place, in order to
welcome death in from the shadows, to reduce its terror. Velutha has a
brother, Kuttappen, a ‘good, safe Paravan’ – Untouchable – who ‘could
neither read nor write’ (p. 207). Kuttappen has been injured long ago
and is paralysed from the chest downwards. After his mother dies,

he was moved into her corner, the corner that Kuttappen imagined
was the corner of his home that Death had reserved to administer
her deathly affairs. One corner for cooking, one for clothes, one for
bedding rolls, one for dying in.

He wondered how long this would take, and what people who had

more than four corners in their houses did with the rest of their
corners. Did it give them a choice of corners to die in?

(pp. 206–7)

But for Kuttappen, as for the other characters, this attempt to domesti-
cate death is not enough. As he lies on his back, year in, year out, watch-
ing ‘his youth saunter past without stopping to say hello’ (p. 206), he
increasingly ﬁnds that ‘insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager
waiter at an expensive restaurant (lighting cigarettes, reﬁlling glasses)’
(p. 207). For Kuttappen there is no possibility of escape; the uncanny
fantasy of premature burial reaches out to encompass him too: ‘on bad
days the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him
like malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out
of him and making him scream’ (p. 207).

It is at this point that we can return to the question of what these

matters have to do with the postcolonial. When Estha returns to
Ayemenem, years after the days of the Terror, his silence is accompa-
nied by a further traumatic reaction: he cannot stop walking.

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Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of
shit, and pesticides bought with World Bank loans. Most of the ﬁsh
had died. The ones that survived suffered from ﬁn-rot and had
broken out in boils.

(p. 13)

Death, then, spreads everywhere: it has no origin and no end, it inﬂects
the landscape and provides its own alternative story, its own ‘text
instead’, in which rural poverty, the caste system, traditional hygiene
and international aid are all consigned to the role of bit-part players.
In the face of this onslaught, words can only exercise an apparently
interruption of the state of things. Chacko, as we have seen, tries to
punctuate history with words:

[his] room was stacked from ﬂoor to ceiling with books. He had read
them all and quoted long passages from them for no apparent reason.
Or at least none that anyone else could fathom. For instance, that
morning, as they drove out through the gate, shouting their good-
byes to Mammachi on the verandah, Chacko suddenly said: ‘Gatsby
turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust
ﬂoated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest
in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men’.

(p. 38)

The occasion is the drive to the airport to pick up Margaret and Sophie
Mol when they ﬁrst ‘return’ to India; the quotation, of course, is from
the opening passage of The Great Gatsby, and it would obviously be pos-
sible to suppose that in fact Chacko has chosen it quite carefully.

certainly ﬁts his own situation to an extent, and the lines immediately
preceding it, which describe ‘an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic
readiness’ could be seen as relating at least to Chacko’s conception of
his own character, even if these aspects have been long since buried in
the sticky heat and dust of Ayemenem. But this would not be to the
point: the point is rather that, although Chacko may have realized
something about the ‘foul dust’ of Ayemenem, his awareness is itself
doubly buried – buried from the capacities of others, of his own family,
and buried in the sense that those inside the History House are paying
no attention to his attempt to mark and alter the helpless passing of
time, the slow careless seepage of Kuttappen’s youth.

What would also be to the point would be to see these words as

ones that also, through the permanently exilic ﬁgure of Gatsby, call

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attention to the overarching postcolonial problem of the relations
between language and experience – the problem, to put it in other
words, of translation. What is it, we might ask, that would need to be
done to Chacko’s experience to make it available to interpretations
derived from Scott Fitzgerald? While in England, Chacko proves com-
pletely incapable of looking after himself; Margaret is ﬁrst drawn to this
helplessness and then, after their marriage, repelled by it. Returned to
India, there is no space the right shape for Chacko to ﬁt into: among
other things, his words are a continuing declaration of his own
inappropriateness, of the ruinous nature of his relation to his own
surroundings.

Rahel, similarly displaced, on a train in New York, observes a crazed

fellow-passenger and decides that ‘memory was that woman on the
train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and
emerged with the most unlikely ones – a ﬂeeting look, a feeling’ (p. 72).
On her return to India, she returns to the river – the river where Sophie
Mol drowned, the river that separates the Ayemenem house from the
house of the Black Sahib, the river that comes to signify taboo and the
unbridgeable divides in Indian society, the river across which Ammu
and Velutha used to row to their assignations on the far bank. Now the
river greets Rahel with ‘a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth
had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed’ (p. 124). Even
what has been a potent symbol, a symbol of potency, has been drained,
lost: has come under the edict of the god of small things, the god of
loss.

Seen from one point of view, the loss is ‘the Loss of Sophie Mol’,

which ‘stepped softly around the Ayemenem House like a quiet thing
in socks. It hid in books and food. In Mammachi’s violin case’ (p. 15).
As time goes further on, ‘Sophie Mol became a Memory, while The Loss
of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. Like a fruit in season. Every season’
(p. 267). But the loss is also incorporated in the Untouchable body of
Velutha, who is as near as the text ever gets to being identiﬁed with the
god of small things. After he knows that he has been betrayed by his
own father, he too goes down to the river.

He stepped onto the path that led through the swamp to the History
House.

He left no ripples in the water.
No footprints on the shore.
He held his mundu spread above his head to dry. The wind lifted

it like a sail. He was suddenly happy. Things will get worse, he thought

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to himself. Then better. He was walking swiftly now, towards the Heart
of Darkness. As lonely as a wolf.

The God of Loss.
The God of Small Things.

(pp. 289–90)

The god of small things, then, would be a god for whom no master-
narratives exist; a god who exists, if at all, in the scattered shards of
history, the ruins of memory; a god who promises a certain freedom,
but only at a terrible price. In so far as the main characters in The God
of Small Things are haunted by the traumatic events of their past, it is
also true that their environment is haunted by its own ghosts: the ghosts
of empire mingling inextricably, shadowily, with other spectres, all
applauding the steady progress of loss, the reduction of the river to a
skull, the impotence of speech, the spread of silence and emptiness.

The narrative of the novel constructs itself not, then, around a linear

retelling of the past but around a set of traumatized evasions and denials
of that past and thus stands at a pivotal point between narrative coher-
ence and a submission to the violent and uncanny pointlessness of fate;
much, we might say, as Gothic narrative, with its diminutions of sub-
jectivity, sublime transcendences of personality, assertions of a notion
of story without adequate beginning or end, also does. If Gothic is con-
stantly threatened by a proliferative loss of coherence, which we may
read as a continuing inability to avoid returning to the scene of an
ineradicable crime, then we may see The God of Small Things as inhab-
iting a cognate terrain, a terrain on which the phantoms of an imposed
history become and remain indistinguishable from the ‘prior’ phantoms
of the ‘native’. Under these circumstances, it is a text subject to multi-
ple hauntings, an ‘aftermathic’ text where the past can only be inscribed
and interpreted through the doubtful and phantomatic interweavings
of the present.

Notes

1. See, for example, Homi Bhabha, ‘The Postcolonial Critic’, Arena 96 (1996),

47–63. My present essay springs from previous remarks I have made about
The God of Small Things in my Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World
Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).

2. See, for example, Robin Sowerby, ‘The Goths in History and Pre-Gothic

Gothic’ and Neil Cornwell, ‘European Gothic’, in David Punter, ed., A Com-
panion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 15–26, 27–38.

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3. See Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Secker and

Warburg, 1961); Donald Ringe, American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982);
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: the Cultural Work of American Fiction
1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

4. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 88.

Further references are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text.

5. See Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul, On India: Writing History, Culture, Post-

Coloniality (Stirling: Oxford Literary Review, 1994).

6. Cf., of course, Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (London: Bloomsbury, 1988),

and Joseph Conrad, The Shadow Line (New York: Doubleday and Page, 1924).

7. See, for example, Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the

Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); David Punter,
Gothic Pathologies: the Text, the Body and the Law (Basingstoke: Macmillan
Press [now Palgrave Macmillan], 1998).

8. See, for example, Kwame Anthony Appiah, In my Father’s House: Africa in the

Philosophy of Culture (London: Methuen, 1992).

9. H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau ([1896] London: Everyman, 1993).

10. See Punter, Gothic Pathologies, pp. 1–18.
11. See Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-

logical Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London:
Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vol. XVII, p. 241 ff.

12. See F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby ([1926] London: Penguin, 1990).

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The Number of Magic Alternatives:
Salman Rushdie’s 1001 Gothic
Nights

Andrew Teverson

208

1001, the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities –
a number beloved of poets and detested by politicians, for
whom all alternative visions of the world are threats.

(Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children)

Bhabha’s Gothic

In the ﬁrst essay in his edited collection of meditations on nationhood,
Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha includes the transcript of a lecture
delivered by Ernest Renan to the Sorbonne in 1882. In this lecture,
written, in part, in response to the rising threat of German nationalism
in the late-nineteenth century, Renan rejects the idea that nation should
be based upon racial origin (and that ‘[t]he Germanic family . . . has the
right to reassemble the scattered limbs of the Germanic order, even
when these limbs are not asking to be joined together again’) and
suggests instead, that secure and stable nations are more likely to be
those that have forgotten their origins.

‘The essence of a nation’, argues

Renan,

is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that
they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether
he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth . . . every French
citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of St Bartholomew . . .
there are not ten families in France that can supply proof of their
Frankish origin, and any such proof would anyway be essentially
ﬂawed, as a consequence of countless unknown alliances which are
liable to disrupt any genealogical system.

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These observations of Renan’s may, surprisingly, owe something to the
more anarchic wisdom of Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in the same year
that Renan delivered his lecture to the Sorbonne, published his dis-
course on knowledge, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), in
which he suggests that the will towards knowledge (of all kinds) is, para-
doxically, equivalent to the will towards ignorance. To know something
clearly, according to Nietzsche, it becomes necessary not to know, or to
suppress, all the perplexities, all the strangeness, all the conﬂicts, that
might disrupt the claim of that article of knowledge to solidity – or in
the case of Renan’s nation, solidarity. The difference between the two
thinkers, is that Renan – as a politician-diplomat in an increasingly
insecure Europe – recognizes the importance of maintaining the ‘life-
preserving’ ﬁction of national coherence whilst Nietzsche launches his
assault upon the foundations of conventional knowledge to formulate
the demand of a poet-philosopher and ask: to what extent can the truth
bear incorporation, to what extent are we strong enough, intellectually,
to assent to all (and inﬁnite) alternative visions of the universe
simultaneously.

Homi Bhabha’s own discussion of nationhood in Nation and Narra-

tion, ‘DissemiNation’ (1990), published a century after Renan and
Nietzsche’s disquisitions, revisits the idea, introduced by Renan, that the
nation is a ﬁction forged by the ‘forgetting’ of all those elements that
might threaten the coherence of the national narrative. Unlike Renan,
however, Bhabha does not see the wisdom of maintaining this particu-
lar ﬁction of nationhood, but, in the spirit of the Nietzschean poet-
philosopher, sets out to disrupt the phenomena of the nation, and in
so doing create a new idea of nation based, not upon the will to exclude
and forget, but upon the attempt (paradoxical and sublime) to remem-
ber everything – to leave no margin unturned. This is partly because
Bhabha sees the act of exclusion (the forgetting) as a mechanism that
does not occur only in the distant past of the nation, but in every
moment of its present. That which must be forgotten for the sake of
ideal national unity is not only a diversity of allegiance that existed in
the moments or centuries before the fusion of the nation into a politi-
cal formation – it is also the diversity that exists synchronically, in the
ongoing performance of national identity, and which must be denied
by any pedagogical and a priori view of nationhood that attempts to
represent the nation as homogenous and holistic. Bhabha also resists
the imperative to forget because that which is forgotten in the ‘uniﬁed’
nation is not only the ancient hatred or the unresolvable grudge but
any manifestation of cultural difference (class, race or gender) that

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impedes the ‘progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion’ – to be
the many as one’.

Bhabha employs a number of subversive strategies in ‘DissemiNation’

designed to resist the act of ‘repression’ implicit in the ideal of the
homogenized nation. One of the most effective forms of resistance used
by Bhabha depends upon the idea, developed from Freud’s analysis of
repression, that that which has been repressed does not remain so, but
returns in distorted and often monstrous forms to threaten the ‘unity’
of the subject. It is these moments of monstrous return (of grotesque
doubling), for Bhabha, that serve to show the weaknesses and fractures
in the idea of the Heim because they reveal the extent to which the cosy
myth of the ‘many as one’ has been built upon a will to ignorance: a
will to deny the differences that exist within the nation, and a will to
secure the nation’s boundaries against that which it conceives as ‘other’.
This is an idea that Bhabha illustrates by reference to Goethe’s Italian
Journey and to a critical analysis of it by Mikhail Bakhtin, in which
Bakhtin claims that the Italian Journey ‘represents the triumph of the
Realistic component over the Romantic’. ‘Goethe’s realist narrative,’
notes Bhabha (summarizing Bakhtin),

produces a national-historical time that makes visible a speciﬁcally
Italian day in the details of its passing time: ‘The bells ring, the rosary
is said, the maid enters the room with a lighted lamp and says:
Felicissima notte! . . . If one were to force a German clockhand on them,
they would be at a loss.’ For Bakhtin, it is Goethe’s vision of the micro-
scopic, elementary, perhaps random, tolling of everyday life in Italy
that reveals the profound history of its locality, the spatialisation of
historical time.

(p. 143)

This realist vision, suggests Bhabha, serves to naturalize the rhetoric
of national afﬁliation and its forms of collective expression. There is,
however, another non-naturalist conception of time at work in Goethe’s
narrative that serves to disrupt the realist vision of time: ‘[t]here is’,
notes Bhabha, ‘always the distracting presence of another temporality
that disturbs the contemporaneity of the national present . . . the
ghostly (Gespenstermässiges), the terrifying (Unerfreuliches) and the unac-
countable (Unzuberechnendes)’ (p. 143). This doubleness of time must be
‘continually surmounted by the structuring process of the visualisation
of [national] time’ (p. 143) if the realist vision of the nation is to be
sustained, but the act of surmounting, Bhabha argues, will always be

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imperfect. The lingering ‘apprehension of the “double and split” time
of national representation’ (p. 144) will have already opened up a
‘liminal uncertain state of cultural belief’ that ‘leads us to question the
homogenous and horizontal view associated with the nation’s imagined
community’ (pp. 143–4).

The Gothic register employed by Bhabha here is no accident. The

Gothic, because it originates as a literary discourse that challenges
Enlightenment ideals of the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘unitary’ (whether in
terms of self, body or book), is already poised to threaten the ‘unitary’
vision of nationhood which Bhabha associates with Enlightenment
thinking. This idealized vision of the nation, as Bhabha presents it,
aspires to the condition of beauty: to be one made out of many, a man-
ifold transformed into a rationally ordered whole. The Gothic irruption,
as a mechanism of the sublime, reminds us that representation is always
under threat from excess, and that any representation which aspires to
the condition of wholeness must be harbouring ghosts that, should they
be revealed, would confound that representation’s dreams of totality.
The ghosts and grotesques of Bhabha’s theory, in this capacity, become
part of an oppositional army, deployed to reveal the lacunae and the
ambivalences in the realistic conception of the nation, and so indicate
the points of weakness from which that conception of nation can be
prised apart. This, however, is only half the story – for whilst Bhabha is
indisputably employing the Gothic in this oppositional, and therefore
fundamentally reactive, role it is also apparent that he wishes to use the
Gothic and its excessive mode of representation in more constructive
and creative ways. He rejects the Enlightenment vision of nationhood,
because such a vision always requires the identiﬁcation of an ‘Other’
(the dream of reason produces monsters) but he also wants to make pos-
sible a means of imagining the modern, disseminated nation, that does
not have resort to othering tactics, but which is capable, nonetheless,
of giving a sense of belonging and a sense of collective-agency. He wants
to create a vision – a utopian vision, perhaps – of a complex time of
national narrative that does not require the suppression of alternative
temporalities, alternative possibilities, but incorporates, without
homogenizing, diverse temporalities and diverse narratives, and so
enables him to envision:

a form of living that is more complex than ‘community’; more sym-
bolic than ‘society’; more connotative than ‘country’; less patriotic
than patrie . . . less homogenous than hegemony . . . more hybrid in
the articulation of cultural differences and identiﬁcations than can

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be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social
antagonism.

(p. 140)

The Gothic register that emerges in Bhabha’s work facilitates the repre-
sentation of this complex national time because it offers the model
for an aesthetic – or an anti-aesthetic – that is capable of (to return to
Nietzsche’s words) ‘bearing incorporation’. It makes possible, through
its relationship with excessive discourses, a mode of representation in
which the object (in this case the nation) can appear to be both present,
because a form is invoked, but also not-present, because that form is
always gesturing beyond itself to the ghosts and shades and shadows
that have had to be banished in the process of making form. This means
that the experience of nationhood, for Bhabha, will always be an
uncanny one, because, in words that he has borrowed from Lévi-Strauss,
the performance of national belonging will involve an engagement in
‘forms of activity which are both at once ours and other’ (p. 163). It
also means that the experience of the modern disseminated nation, in
Bhabha’s terms, will be sublime, because nation will become something
that can be apprehended, but never grasped or envisioned in its ﬁnal
state. The variety of the sublime employed by Bhabha in his attempt to
deﬁne the disseminated nation, however, will be slightly different from
the more orthodox sublime formulated, famously, by Immanuel Kant
in his third Critique; for whilst, in Kant’s presentation, the sublime
becomes yet another mechanism for making the multiform into one
(since the failure of the senses to grasp a phenomenal ‘whole’ is only a
prelude to the elevation of the reason which, as a supersensible faculty,
enables the mind to ‘employ itself upon ideas involving higher ﬁnal-
ity’, in Bhabha’s work, which follows in the footsteps of Fanon and
Kristeva, the challenge is accepted ‘to think the question of community
and communication without the moment of transcendence’ (p. 153).

The sublime act of over-reaching, in this case, operates to produce ‘a
liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses of
minorities’ (p. 148), but offers no mechanism for the surmounting of
that liminality – so that the liminal actually comes to constitute the
time and space of the nation.

If we follow Vijay Mishra’s argument in The Gothic Sublime, this non-

totalizing variety of the sublime has its roots in the anti-Kantian tradi-
tion of the Gothic novel, which also refuses the Romantic moment of
transcendence and replaces it with ‘the liminality of the unthinkable’.

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‘[W]here Kant and the Romantic sublime offered the possibility of self-
transcendence’, argues Mishra,

The Gothic subject no longer seeks permission for what is funda-
mentally an illicit communion with the sublime. The metaphorics
of soaring and overcoming, of the triumphant return of the subject
to the fold of reason, are now replaced by those of the abyss and dis-
solution as the subject is dragged into the sublime object.

It is this characteristic of the Gothic sublime, according to Mishra, that
makes it ‘a kind of traumatized earlier moment’ of the Lyotardian or
postmodern sublime.

In Bhabha’s usage, however, where sublimity is

connected to the problems of nationhood speciﬁcally, we can also see
how the sublime becomes expedient in a postcolonial capacity, as a
means of constructing a liminal, non-totalized idea of community. The
Gothic, in this sense, is not just a moment of subversion that terrorizes
the boundaries, borders and categories of Enlightenment representa-
tion, it is also a vehicle for reconstruction, which gives Bhabha an archi-
tecture (or anti-architecture) that enables him to imagine the impossible
form that the disseminated nation might take.

Impossible architectures

Another text which is preoccupied with the question of how to write
the nation without the moment of transcendence, and without the pre-
rogative to ‘forget’ the internal differences that characterize the life of
the nation, is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). In Midnight’s
Children, however, this preoccupation is linked speciﬁcally to the
problem of how to write a history for India after independence. To what
extent is it possible to tell the history of post-independence India
without leaving any of the competing national narratives out of the
account? What kind of form can be found for the telling of the national
narrative now that the national narrative can no longer be united
through its opposition to British rule? What kind of impossible architec-
ture is required? Rushdie’s egotistical and obsessive narrator Saleem Sinai
believes that he can impose a form on recent Indian history, based on
his own autobiography. He succumbs, as he himself observes, to ‘the
illusion of the artist’: that ‘the multitudinous realities of the land [are]
the raw and unshaped material of [his] gift’ (p. 172). The reader,
however, and on occasion Saleem himself, is made aware that Saleem’s

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dream of ‘encapsulating’ India using his gift is a hubristic dream,
because the diversity of the tale that is to be told renders all acts of
encapsulation inadequate. Indian culture, as Rushdie has suggested on
several occasions, is so plural and the history of its allegiances and
borrowings so hybrid, that no representation could account for all the
different elements that combine to make the lived life of the nation.
The ‘deﬁning image of India is the crowd’, as he notes in ‘The Riddle
of Midnight’, ‘and a crowd is by its very nature superabundant, het-
erogeneous, many things at once’.

In Midnight’s Children a number of the characters, as well as Saleem

himself, are involved in the task of imagining ‘architectures’ or strate-
gies of containment which enable them to master this crowd by con-
verting it into something coherent and imaginable (and therefore
manageable and ‘meaningful’). Perhaps the most pointed instance of
this is the attempt made by the peepshow owner, Lifafa Das, to encom-
pass all India by forcing it into his picture-postcard exhibition and
allowing viewers to witness it frame by frame. At ﬁrst Lifafa is conﬁdent
that he has achieved his aim and walks the streets inviting punters to
‘come see everything, come see! Come see Delhi, come see India, come
see!’ (p. 73). As time goes by, however, Lifafa becomes increasingly dis-
satisﬁed with his encompassment and starts trying to ﬁt even more
into his exhibition: ‘The hyperbolic formula began, after a time, to prey
upon his mind; more and more picture postcards went into his
peepshow as he tried, desperately, to deliver what he promised, to put
everything into his box’ (p. 75).

Finally, Lifafa’s dream of encapsulation is shattered, unceremoniously,

when he is mobbed and nearly murdered by a crowd of Muslims because
he is a Hindu. ‘Hindu! Hindu! Hindu!’ chants a little girl who has been
unable to see his show:

[a]nd chick-blinds are ﬂying up; and from his window the girl’s father
leans out and joins in, hurling abuse at a new target, and the Bengali
joins in in Bengali . . . ‘Mother raper! Violator of our daughters!’ . . .
and remember the papers have been talking about assaults on
Muslim children, so suddenly a voice screams out . . . ‘Rapist! Arré my
God they found the badmaash! There he is!’ And now the insanity
of the cloud like a pointing ﬁnger and the whole disjointed unreal-
ity of the times seizes the muhalla, and the screams are echoing from
every window, and the schoolboys have begun to chant, ‘Ra-pist!
Ra-pist! Ray-ray-ray-pist!’

(p. 76)

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The problem that confronts Lifafa Das in this episode, like the problem
that confronts Saleem in his attempts to unify the Midnight’s Children,
is that people do not forget their differences easily. He attempts to forge
a unitary idea of nationhood that will encompass the multitudes in a
single frame, and he discovers that though the differences within the
multitude may be suppressed by the imposition of an aesthetic order,
they will not go away; repressed, they will only return – but with even
more strength and even more violence. His experiences, in this respect,
hold up a mirror to the experiences of the Indian nation, post-partition,
which is also trying to ﬁnd a new form for itself, and which is also failing
with violent and bloody results. This new India, as Rushdie suggests in
one of the most forceful satirical passages of the novel, has been
‘brought into being by a phenomenal collective will’ and is a dream that
all Indians have temporarily agreed to dream, but because it is a dream
that is not supported by any realistic historical idea of the ingrained
and insurmountable cultural differences within India, it also becomes
‘a mass fantasy [that] . . . would periodically need the sanctiﬁcation and
renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood’ (p. 111).

In passages such as this Rushdie is playing the role of the pessimist,

and providing a ﬁctional illustration of the idea implicit in Bhabha’s
work: that the forcible imposition of a myth of unity, and the repres-
sion of difference for the sake of unity, will not make difference disap-
pear; it will only smooth the cracks over, whilst resentment is left to
incubate in darkness, until it returns in monstrous, grotesque and
violent forms.

The ‘rituals of blood’ that fracture and fragment the

idealized vision of a united India, in this sense, can be regarded as
equivalent to the irruptions of ‘the ghostly . . . the terrifying . . . and the
unaccountable’ (Bhabha, p. 143) that fracture and fragment the realist
conception of a ‘homogenized’ nation in Bhabha’s account, cited above.
In both cases, writer and theorist are attempting to demonstrate the lim-
itations of any form of nationality that seeks an a priori total expression
and takes no account of the divergent experiences of those members
who make up, and perform, the life of the nation.

The roles of pessimist and satirist, however, are not (contrary to the

opinion of some commentators) the only roles that Rushdie can play.
Like Bhabha he offers a critique of conceptions of nation that he ﬁnds
inadequate or destructive, but he does so in order to imagine alterna-
tive narrative architectures that can communicate nation-ness without
diminishing the perplexing and ambivalent operations of cultural dif-
ference. Even whilst Rushdie is showing how unitary ideas of nation-
hood result in disruption and violence, therefore, it is also necessary to

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recognize that he is attempting to demonstrate that there can be a form
of national architecture, or anti-architecture, that can incorporate
difference without surmounting it or reducing it. This alternative archi-
tecture, I would suggest, is embodied primarily in the ghost-ridden tex-
tuality of Midnight’s Children itself; as a novel that, despite the drive for
closure exhibited by its narrator, neither achieves completion nor sur-
mounts the inconsistencies and aporias that litter the text.

Saleem, as has already been suggested, strives to achieve a total vision

of both his life and the life of the nation that he describes, and through-
out the text he is troubled by the need to impose structure and meaning
upon his experiences. As he notes on the ﬁrst page of his narration,
‘there are so many stories to tell . . . such an excess of intertwined lives
events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improb-
able and the mundane’ that he will have to ‘work fast, faster than
Scheherazade, if [he is] to end up meaning – yes, meaning, something’
(‘I admit it’ he adds, ‘above all things, I fear absurdity’) (p. 11). Saleem
fails in this self-imposed task because, like the narrators and heroes of
Beckett’s novels and plays (who also suffer from a terror of absurdity
and meaninglessness), he is unable to draw the multiple strands of his
autobiography/history into a network of meaning before exhaustion
and fragmentation overtake him. Towards the end of the novel, for
instance, he meets a man who has extruded a 15-inch turd and is about
to tell his tale, when he realizes that he is too tired, too decayed, to do
so. ‘Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his
life-story’, laments Saleem:

The hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the
connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into my
life . . . but now I’m disconnected, unplugged, with only epitaphs left
to write . . . Tomorrow. Or the day after. The cracks will be waiting
for August 15

. There is still a little time: I’ll ﬁnish tomorrow.

(p. 440)

The failure of Saleem’s attempt to tell the ‘whole’ story, however,
indicates not the absolute impossibility of representing history, or
autobiography, or nation post-partition, but the impossibility of
representing it in the all-encompassing fashion that is his ideal: he fails
only to the extent that he is unable – like Lifafa – to give us a total
vision of India that incorporates everything there is to be told. The text
of Midnight’s Children, however, which both is Saleem’s narrative and is
in excess of Saleem’s narrative, suggests the possibility of an alternative

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mode of representing nation because it shows that, even without a total
explanation being achieved, even without all the stories being told,
even without a conclusion being reached, a representation of nation, or
a performance of nation-ness, has nevertheless been enacted. This
enactment is Midnight’s Children itself – which does not attempt to
assimilate all the narratives into its own necessarily limited frames, but
gestures beyond its own frames to the potential narratives, the untold
tales of defecating men, that are incorporated as shadows, half-pres-
ences and potentialities, even as they are excluded from the ofﬁcial nar-
rative organization. The effective ‘meaning’ of Midnight’s Children, in
this sense, whilst not attained by Saleem as narrator, comes to exist in
what Bhabha would call ‘the hybrid moment outside the sentence’
whilst the text remains a sublime fragment of a tale that is so vast it
is incommunicable; that is so complex we can never impose closure
upon it.

In constituting itself as a story that is only a fragment of a larger and

potentially inﬁnite narrative Midnight’s Children bears comparison with
another potentially inﬁnite narrative collection – the Arabian Nights; a
text that Saleem cites repeatedly because the exigencies of its narrator
Scheherazade reﬂect, to some extent, his own exigencies. She too was
telling tales against the clock, using her furious inventiveness to hold
off the moment at which Shahriyar has decreed her death, and she too
(perhaps most importantly for our purposes) had an endless tale to tell.
Like Saleem her story-telling had to end at some point – when, in this
instance, Shahriyar relented and released her from her sentence – but
her true genius was to know that, barring external and arbitrary inter-
ventions, she could, if necessary, have gone on telling tales for all eter-
nity (and it is for this reason, no doubt, that Richard Burton, in the
terminal essay of his translation, cites an Arabic legend that no man can
ﬁnish the Arabian Nights without dying ﬁrst: no life can outlast narra-
tives that are continuously woven from the ever-varying texture of
experience).

In the Arabian Nights, as in Midnight’s Children, this potent fertility of

tale-telling is symbolized by the number 1001: a number that expresses
eloquently the paradoxical nature of story-telling operated in both col-
lections, because it holds out the promise of a body of stories – a thou-
sand and one tales of a numinous midnight – but it also suggests that
this body of stories will have no end because there will always be one
more tale to tell – or one more pickle jar to ﬁll. The magic of this for-
mulation, if we follow Jorge Luis Borges’ argument in one of his essays
on the Nights, results from the fact that 1001 is both a number and not

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a number at the same time. It is an imaginable amount, 1001, but it is
also ‘consubstantial with the inﬁnite’ because it means not a thousand
nights plus a night, but a thousand nights and one more night, and one
more night, and one more night ad inﬁnitum, where each night grows
out of the frame of all previous nights, and so changes the constitution
of all previous nights.

For Borges this sense of spiralling narrative

inﬁnitude induces in the reader or hearer of the Nights a kind of ‘vertigo’
or awe in the face of the never-ending, and this in turn makes him or
her aware of an excess of possible metaphysical realities. For Rushdie
too, as the epigraph to this chapter suggests, the magic of the number
1001 is linked to its capacity to alert us to the possibility of multiple
‘alternative realities’ – although in Midnight’s Children, I would suggest,
the multiplicity of the number 1001 is connected more explicitly to an
idea of numinousness in national culture, since 1001 is also the number
of the Midnight’s Children who will come to constitute the ﬁrst gen-
eration of Indians born into an independent state. The excessiveness of
the number of midnight, in this more nationalistic capacity, gives
Rushdie a means of imagining a utopian (but fantastical) national for-
mation that both exists as a coherent numerical entity (1001) – but,
simultaneously, is not monumental and ‘whole’, since the additional ‘1’
implies that inﬁnite additions that can be made to the narrative of the
nation, without there being a point at which the additions will add up
to a totality. The number 1001, in other words, will give Rushdie the
numerical principle for community that – as the epigraph also suggests
– is ‘beloved of poets’ (and Nietzschean philosophers) who struggle for
a sublime vision of unending incorporation, but ‘detested by politicians’
(and Renanian Diplomatists) who wish to create a coherent vision of
the world that can be managed and controlled.

The narrative model of the Arabian Nights, in this way, gives Rushdie

a means of concretizing, or allegorizing, an approach to cultural differ-
ence within the nation that is also explored in the work of Bhabha. For
Bhabha, cultural difference should not be understood (as it is under-
stood in liberal discourse) ‘as the free play of polarities and pluralities
in the homogenous empty time of the national community’. Cultural
difference, Bhabha argues, should be seen as ‘a form of intervention
[that] partakes in the logic of supplementary subversion’ (p. 162). Each
emergent form of cultural knowledge, according to this model, is not
subsumed within the nation in such a way that the teleology of the
nation remains unchanged. Each emergent form of cultural knowledge
is a supplement to the nation and, like the supplementary question put
to a motion in parliamentary debate, challenges and transforms the

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sense of the motion as it was expressed before the question was put.
‘[W]e cannot contextualise the emergent cultural form by locating it in
terms of some pre-given discursive causality or origin’ writes Bhabha:

We must always keep open a supplementary space for the articula-
tion of cultural knowledges that are adjacent and adjunct but not
necessarily accumulative, teleological or dialectical. The ‘difference’
of cultural knowledge that ‘adds to’ but does not ‘add up’ is the
enemy of the implicit generalisation of knowledge or the implicit
homogenisation of experience, which Claude Lefort deﬁnes as the
major strategies of conﬁnement and closure in modern bourgeois
ideology.

(p. 163)

The narrative model of the Arabian Nights, where each new narrative
(1001+1) does not accumulate to make up an epic plot, and where each
additional tale is like a supplement to the tales that have so far been
told, provides Rushdie with an appropriate analogy for this sense of cul-
tural additiveness and cultural subversion. It enables him to show that
there is no point at which the tales told by Saleem in negotiation of the
nation will reach some kind of conclusion, but it also enables him to
show that the narrative of the nation, in some sense, can be told – if it
is told as a perplexed and ambivalent story that is continuously under
threat from the inﬁnite stories that have not yet been spoken. In this
respect Rushdie has created in Midnight’s Children, through the Arabian
Nights, an embodiment of the idea expressed cryptically in Bhabha’s
‘DissemiNation’ – that it is ‘at the insurmountable extremes of story-
telling, [that] we encounter the question of cultural difference as the
perplexity of living and writing the nation’ (p. 161).

Gothic Nights

In the work of Bhabha, as suggested at the start of this chapter, this con-
ception of the disseminated nation is formulated, in part, by reference
to Gothic discourses. The Gothic, I argued, gives Bhabha a mode of
writing that is ‘ambivalent’ and ‘doubling’ because it implies that there
are more causalities (to paraphrase Borges) than can be imagined using
the causality that we know. In Midnight’s Children, as the previous dis-
cussion would suggest, Rushdie is attempting to deﬁne a similar con-
ception of nationhood, but does so, not by reference to the duality
and ghostliness of Gothic ﬁction, but by reference to the inﬁnite and

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intertwining narrative architectures of the thousand-and-one tales of
the thousand-and-one nights. Rushdie’s sublime, it might seem as a
result, is a sublime developed using the example of ancient Sanskrit or
Persian or Arabic story-telling whilst Bhabha’s is developed using the
example of Gothic ﬁction and art.

The briefest investigation of the development of the Arabian Nights,

however, would serve to show that Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic story-
telling, particularly in the form of the Nights, was no minor inﬂuence
in the development of Gothic ﬁction and that – as a result – the narra-
tive sublimity of the Nights and the terrorizing sublimity of the Gothic
are more closely interconnected than might be at ﬁrst supposed. Some
commentators, indeed, have suggested that the idea of a sublime Nights,
as an excessive and overwhelming form of narration, does not develop
until after the Arabian Nights was introduced into Europe and became,
in time, one of the staple sources of the Gothic tale.

Rana Kabbani, in

Europe’s Myths of Orient, for instance, argues that the idea of ‘a circular
narrative that portrayed an imaginary space of a thousand and one
reveries’ is not one that springs from the Indian or Arabian Nights at all,
but a Western reading of the Nights that appeared in the course of its
adoption by Orientalist scholars in the early eighteenth century.

Prior

to this adoption, Kabbani writes,

there was no deﬁnitive text of the Alf Laila wa-laila [literally ‘one
thousand nights and a night’] but numerous variations on that par-
ticular sort of oral narrative . . . It was only when a European encoun-
tered these stories, decided to translate them, and produced a set text
that remained in currency for over a century (1704–1838) that they
became institutionalised in the way they are known in the West.

It is in the process of institutionalization and formalization, Kabbani
goes on to argue, that scholars are ‘seduced into seeing those aspects
[they] had expected to see’: a sublime narrative that reﬂects the sup-
posed excess, irrationality and violence of the East.

This view of the Nights, which Kabbani suggests is ﬁrst promoted by

translators and mediators of the collection such as Antoine Galland, is
reinforced by ﬁction writers who appropriated the Nights once it had
become common cultural currency in Europe. William Beckford, in par-
ticular, in his eccentric and unclassiﬁable exercise in the bizarre, Vathek
(1786), initiated the vogue for using the Nights to imagine ‘architec-
ture[s] unknown in the records of the earth’, and is largely responsible
for transforming the collection into a pretext for, in the words of a con-

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temporary reviewer, ‘a machinery, not only new, but wild and sublime
[which] seizes on the mind, and pervades the whole composition’.

At least one eighteenth-century commentator on Vathek attributes
these excessive architectural qualities directly to the Nights themselves:
Vathek, suggests the Monthly Review, ‘preserves the peculiar character of
the Arabian Tale, which is not only to overstep the nature of probabi-
lity, but even to pass beyond the verge of possibility, and suppose
things, which cannot be for a moment conceived’.

As Kabbani’s argu-

ment would imply, however, this is as much a vision of the Arabian
Nights created by Galland and Beckford themselves, as it is a faithful
rendering of the Nights as it would have been heard in the Middle East
and India in the preceding centuries. Indisputably, the Nights, in its
Middle Eastern and Indic forms, is excessive and improbable, but the
idea that it passes ‘beyond the verge’ and that it supposes things that
‘cannot be for a moment conceived’ suggests a peculiarly eighteenth-
century preoccupation.

It is arguably Beckford’s mutated version of the Nights – exotic,

extreme, threatening – rather than the Nights themselves (whatever they
may be), that had the profoundest inﬂuence upon later appropriations
of the Oriental tale in Europe. When James Hogg, Jan Potocki, Matthew
Lewis and Charles Maturin come to the collection, it is likely that they
do so under the shadow of Beckford’s nightmare vision, and even when
writers less consistently Gothic in their oeuvre cite the Nights their
emphasis upon its terrifying qualities suggest the presence of the Beck-
fordian rather than the Scheherazadian muse. Coleridge, for whom the
Nights was a crucial inﬂuence, notes that it was an early reading of the
Nights and other tales that had ‘habituated [him] to the vast’, and
claimed that a childhood reading of a particular Nights story caused him
to be ‘haunted by spectres whenever [he] was in the dark’.

Similarly,

Thomas De Quincey, in his Suspiria de Profundis, which is haunted from
start to ﬁnish by Orientalist imaginings, recalls the Arabian Nights in
association with profound ‘horror and grief’.

Even 200 years later when

Bram Stoker has Jonathan Harker mention that his journal ‘seems hor-
ribly like the beginning of the “Arabian Nights” ’ he is referring back to
the Gothicised Nights invented by Beckford, with its presage of incipi-
ent disorder, incipient loss of self, and incipient loss of homeland.

These terrors conjured by the Nights in the Gothic and Romantic

imagination have a twofold source. On the one hand the terror of the
Nights is a product of its association with the Orient which, as Europe’s
‘other place’, is a locus of the unknown, the excessive and the terrible.
The second ‘terror’ of the Nights, nascent in Beckford, fully formed in

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Maturin, is architectural, and is linked to the fear of loss of control,
of accumulating disorder, of alienation, of loss of coherent boundary.
What terriﬁes De Quincey, what terriﬁes Coleridge, what is terrifying in
Maturin and Potocki is the architecture of sublimity, embodied by the
Nights, that threatens the reader with incarceration in tales upon tales
upon tales (one more night and one more night and one more night)
and entrapment in frames upon frames upon frames.

In Vathek this architectural terror of the unending is registered in

elements of the plot – in the Caliph’s monstrous fate, or in the Halls
of Eblis which, like the Nights, allow its occupants to go ‘wandering on,
from chamber to chamber, hall to hall, and gallery to gallery; all without
bounds or limit’.

It is also (almost) registered structurally in the tales

within tales that the strangers Vathek and Nouronihar encounter in the
Halls of Eblis begin to tell, but that Beckford did not complete.

Had

they been completed these tales within tales would have forged a direct
link between Beckford’s novel and the Chinese-box narrative structure
of the Nights; as it is, it is left for Beckford’s Gothic successors to embody
the sublime architecture of the Nights in the narrative structure itself.
Perhaps the two most successful examples of this embodiment come in
Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which folds tale within tale to
tell the jigsaw wanderings of its Byronic anti-hero, and (a novel much
admired by Rushdie) Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which
adapts the Arabian Nights formula to tell the tale of the peregrinations
of its hero Alphonse van Worden as he makes his way through the Sierra
Morena.

If it is in novels such as these that the idea of the Nights as a ter-

rorizing and overwhelming narrative architecture develops, and if, as
has been suggested, Salman Rushdie makes use of the Nights primarily
because it gives him the precedent for a narrative collection that is so
excessive and extreme it is able to confound the form-making preoccu-
pations of his hero Saleem, the implication must be that Rushdie’s
Nights are less the Nights that would have been told and circulated by
storytellers in Syria, Persia, India and Arabia, and more the Nights that
were appropriated by European writers and translators in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Rushdie’s Nights, it might seem, are not the
Nights of Indian story-telling, but a more modern Nights – mediated
and transformed by their passage through the alchemical laboratories
of Gothic ﬁction. Perhaps the strongest support for this contention
comes from an observation made by Rushdie upon Potocki’s Manuscript
Found in Saragossa, in which he recognizes the novel’s clear derivation
from the Arabian Nights, yet chooses not to emphasize the ancient story-

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telling heritage that this gives the novel but, perversely, the impression
of ‘modernity’ that an Arabian Nights-style narrative imparts. ‘It reads,’
he notes, ‘like the most brilliant modern novel, like it was written yes-
terday . . . there are connections to Calvino, to any of those riddling
writers, and it has all kinds of Gothic aspects, it’s also very sexy’.

The

implication behind this observation is that the Nights Rushdie seeks to
reproduce in his own ‘modern’ novels (which were written ‘yesterday’)
are not the Nights of the older story-telling tradition but the ‘modern’
Nights that originate in self-conscious Gothic tales such as Potocki’s,
which in turn seeded the tricksy, metaﬁctional experiments of writers
such as Borges or Italo Calvino.

The possibility that Rushdie’s Nights are the Nights shaped in

eighteenth-century Europe, in the Gothic Orientalist novel, clearly
raises some ideological problems for him. If the Gothic Orientalist
Nights, as Kabbani observes, has proved a key source in the Western con-
struction of a sensual, tyrannical, extravagant, mysterious East, and if
the apprehension of inﬁnite recursion is based upon the Western fear
of an amorphous and all-subsuming Orient, then Rushdie, in repro-
ducing this text in his own ﬁctions, is clearly opening himself up to
accusations such as those levelled by Aijaz Ahmad, that he is, in his use
of sources, reinforcing the very discourses that he sets out to challenge.
A number of arguments can be, and have been, offered to defend
Rushdie against these charges. It can be argued, for instance, that
Rushdie is self-consciously appropriating the Orientalist Nights in order
to interrogate Orientalism and re-appropriate the Nights for his own
ends. It is also possible to argue that Rushdie is interested in the Nights
because, as an ‘Eastern’ narrative that has been used as a vehicle for
‘Western’ Orientalism, it has become one of the ‘broken mirrors’ that
enables the migrant, also a hybrid of two or more cultures, to better
understand his or her own complex cultural position. ‘The broken
mirror’, as Rushdie has famously argued, ‘may actually be as valuable
as the one which is supposedly unﬂawed [because] . . . . [t]he broken
glass is not merely a mirror of nostalgia. It is also . . . a useful tool with
which to work in the present’.

Both of these arguments have been

explored elsewhere and will not be considered further here.

The pos-

sibility of another kind of argument, however, is opened up if we take
into account both the reasons for which Gothic writers employ the
Nights, and the reasons for which Rushdie might, in turn, appropriate
them. On one hand, as we have seen, the Nights are regarded as a source
of terror by Gothic writers because they are associated with the ‘East’ as
a mysterious and threatening ‘other’ place. To the extent that Rushdie

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uses the Nights to conjure up this vision of fearsome and exotic other-
ness, we might argue, he is indeed risking accusations of neo-
Orientalism from hostile critics. On the other hand, however, we have
also seen that the Nights become terrifying in Gothic ﬁction, because,
as a model of sublime narrative over-reaching, they represent a threat
and a challenge to the orderly forms of narrative promoted by Enlight-
enment rationalist philosophies. To the extent that Rushdie uses the
Gothic Nights in this capacity, we might argue, he is making use of a
narrative source that can provide him (as the Gothic provides Bhabha)
with the precedent for an antagonistic narrative formation that resists
the idealized conceptions of society and nationhood implicit in Enlight-
enment narratives, and that can support the formulation of an alterna-
tive conception of society and nationhood based upon non-totalizing
and non-universalizing principles. Not only does this suggest that
Rushdie is able to make use of the Nights for reasons other than those
immediately connected with its role as an Orientalist text, it also gives
us the paradoxical, but ultimately satisfying argument, that Rushdie, in
using the Nights of the ‘Orient’ as a narrative precedent for a challenge
to the universalizing principles of Enlightenment rationalism, is deploy-
ing a collection that has played a signiﬁcant role in the ‘othering’ of
the Orient by the West in order to strike a blow against the very philo-
sophical systems upon which that othering rested.

In order for the Nights to fulﬁl this function in Rushdie’s ﬁction,

however, there must remain one crucial distinction between the Arabian
Nights of Midnight’s Children and the Arabian Nights of Vathek or
Melmoth. In Gothic ﬁction the function of the Nights is to alarm (and
console) the European reader with a nightmare vision of all that s/he
believes Europe is not. This means that the terror of the Nights, like
Gothic terror more generally, tends to fulﬁl a conservative function: it
reminds the reader of the perils attendant upon a seduction by unrea-
son, by showing him/her how an alliance with numinous Eastern nights
leads ultimately to the disordering, and dissolution, of body, soul and
state. Rushdie’s ﬁction follows an equivalent pattern in so far as he too
uses the Gothic Nights to disrupt and disorder body, soul and state;
unlike the writers of Gothic ﬁction, however, Rushdie does not present
this disruption as a nightmare to be shunned, but as an enabling
mechanism to be embraced.

This difference in the evaluation of the nation as locus of sublime

excess is perhaps most apparent in the contrast between Rushdie or
Bhabha’s analyses, and the analysis provided by Edmund Burke in his

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Reﬂections on the Revolution in France (1790). For Burke, the sublime is a
fundamentally anti-social aesthetic because it offers a challenge to the
order and coherence that he sees as the principal social virtue. When
such disorderly passions become associated with nation-making, as they
are, according to Burke, in the formation of the French nation during
and after the Revolution, the result is a ‘strange chaos of levity and
ferocity’ in which ‘everything seems out of nature’ and in which ‘[a]
monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues and nations’ combine to
create an idea of community that is ‘deformed’ and ‘abominable’.

the nation created as Gothic-sublime object, for Burke, all categories
become confounded and all order is lost: genres become intertwined
(the scene is ‘tragicomic’, p. 11), the people are transformed into ‘a
mixed mob’ (p. 79), and even architectural principles are threatened
(‘[a]s they have inverted order in all things, the gallery is in place of the
house’, p. 79). There is, Burke concludes, nothing constructive in this
sublime and excessive form of the nation, it is ﬁtted only to perpetuate
destruction as (like one Nights narrative seeding another) each succes-
sive disruption unfolds further, self-proliferating disruptions:

The Assembly, which overthrows kings and kingdoms . . . . have a
power given to them, like that of the evil principle, to subvert and
destroy, but none to construct, except such machines as may be ﬁtted
for further subversion and further destruction.

(p. 79)

For Rushdie and for Bhabha, the nation created as sublime object is also
anti-social, but only to the extent that it subverts Burke’s idea of socia-
bility. The same mixing of genres, of voices, of narratives, of nations is
a feature of Salman Rushdie’s texts; Rushdie, too, confounds the tragic
with the comic, one race with another, one architecture with another,
but in Rushdie’s case this state of hybridity is not anathematized; on
the contrary, it is treated as a thing of potential because it provides the
key to the disseminated nation of the migrant’s imagination that exists
without teleology and without ﬁnality. The hybrid nation of Rushdie’s
imagining is still comparable to the conception of nationhood that
Burke regarded as an abomination, because it is a conception of nation-
hood that appals Enlightenment principles of order and coherence.
Rushdie and Bhabha, however, have taken the thing that Burke found
abject, and made a virtue of its leakiness, its ﬂuxiness, its abhorrence of
boundary.

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At the start of this chapter I suggested that the Gothic serves two con-
nected but diverse functions in the theoretical work of Homi Bhabha.
On the one hand, it operates as a form of terrorism because of its asso-
ciation with the disruptive anti-aesthetic of the sublime that, in the
words of Donald Pease, has ‘a power to make trouble for categorizing
procedures’.

The Gothic sublime, in this capacity, becomes a means of

resisting the order, the rationalism, implicit in the aesthetic category of
the beautiful, which is the founding aesthetic of Enlightenment ideol-
ogy and, consequently, of the conceptions of the modern nation devel-
oped during the Enlightenment. On the other hand, however, I also
argued that the Gothic sublime serves a more constructive function in
Bhabha’s theorization of the disseminated nation since it opens up a
nebulous space for alternative ordering systems that do not require
closure, and do not require deﬁnitive representation, but can nonethe-
less exist as viable modes of thinking and being. It is now possible
to suggest that the Gothic and the sublime play a similar dual role in
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. On the one hand, Rushdie shows how
conceptions of nationhood that depend upon ideals of totalization and
uniﬁcation will be fractured by irruptions of violent bloodshed as
cultural difference that has been repressed returns in vengeful and dis-
ruptive forms. On the other hand, Rushdie also shows how a sublime
architecture borrowed from the Arabian Nights – as seen through the
lens of the Gothic writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries –
can be used to imagine a form(lessness) for a national experience ‘that
classic rules about form or structure’ are no longer sufﬁcient to
represent.

Notes

1. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Cape, 1993) p. 212. All

subsequent references are taken from this edition, and are given in paren-
theses in the text.

2. Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ (1882) in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and

Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 8–22, at p. 13.

3. Ibid., p. 11.
4. Fredrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882) in R.J. Hollingdale, trans. and ed.,

The Nietzsche Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 60.

5. Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the

Modern Nation’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp.
139–70, at p. 142. All subsequent references are from this edition, and are
given in parentheses in the text.

6. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), II.23, p. 92.

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7. Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press,

1994), p. 233.

8. Ibid., p. 226.
9. Ibid., p. 20.

10. Salman Rushdie, ‘The Riddle of Midnight’ in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and

Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), pp. 26–33, at p. 32.

11. Perhaps the most obvious illustration of this idea in Rushdie’s ﬁction comes

not in Midnight’s Children but in Shame with the character of Suﬁya Zinobia
who, ‘preternaturally receptive’ to ‘the unfelt shame of those around her’
(pp. 122 and 141), is periodically transformed from Beauty into Beast. As a
beast, according to Rushdie’s narrator, she represents ‘the will to ignorance,
the iron folly with which we excise from consciousness whatever con-
sciousness cannot bear’ (p. 199).

12. Homi Bhabha, ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern’, in The Location of

Culture, pp. 171–97, at p. 181.

13. Richard Burton, trans., A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’

Entertainments, now Entitled: the Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night, 10
vols, (Kamashastra: Benares, 1885), vol. 1, p. 166.

14. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ in Seven Nights, trans. Eliot

Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 1984), pp. 42–57, at pp. 45–6. Fou-
cault has a similar, but subtly different conceit. He suggests that the extra
night of the Thousand and One Nights ‘is one night too many . . . a thousand
would have been enough’. This one night too many, for Foucault, becomes
‘the fatal space in which language speaks of itself.’ See Michel Foucault, ‘Lan-
guage to Inﬁnity’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp.
53–67, at p. 58.

15. Antoine Galland introduced the Nights to Europe in 1704 when he published

the ﬁrst two volumes of his translation Les Mille et Une Nuits. Many of the
tales from the Nights had already been circulating before this time, borne
along trade routes, or carried home by religious crusaders, but this was the
ﬁrst time that the Nights had become available to the literary elite as a body
of work legitimised by scholarly annotations.

16. Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press [now

Palgrave Macmillan], 1986), p. 24.

17. Ibid., p. 23.
18. Ibid., p. 25.
19. William Beckford, Vathek in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 149–255, at p. 243. Henry Maty, A
New Review, June/July 1786; quoted in Roger Lonsdale, ‘Introduction’ to
Vathek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. xx.

20. The Monthly Review, May 1787; quoted in Lonsdale, ‘Introduction’, p. xix.
21. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, vol. 1., ed. E.L. Griggs (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 347.

22. Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings,

ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 69.

23. Bram Stoker, Dracula (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 42.
24. This second terror, I would suggest, connects the Nights, as one of the key

architectural sources of the Gothic narrative, to another architectural source

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of Gothic horror: the drawings of Piranesi which also formalise the form-
defying and give structural basis to the apprehension of the inﬁnite. In
evidence of this, the famous description of Piranesi’s Carceri (or Dreams as
he calls them) given by De Quincey sounds not unlike a description that he
might also give of the Nights. See De Quincey, Confessions, p. 70.

25. Beckford, Vathek, p. 250.
26. Additional episodes for Vathek were written by Beckford, but never published

in his lifetime. They were rediscovered and published early in the twentieth
century.

27. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, trans. Ian Maclean

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). The Manuscript remained incomplete at
Potocki’s death in 1815. Portions of it were published in 1805, 1814 and
1815. The ﬁrst modern edition appeared in French in 1989.

28. Salman Rushdie, ‘What are you Reading Currently’, in the Guardian G2T (9

June 1995), p. 4. Rushdie had not read the novel until the appearance of the
full English translation in 1995, though he claims to have been interested
in it since he saw a Polish ﬁlm version when at Cambridge.

29. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, pp. 10–11.
30. For instance, they are implicit in Stephen Baker’s recent discussion of the

issue in The Fiction of Postmodernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2000). ‘Rushdie’s writing’, Baker argues, ‘seems unable to escape the dis-
course of Orientalism’ (p. 170) but ‘. . . it is as though [it] . . . were to exist
at a slight angle to Orientalist practice, neither quite ﬁtting in nor fully
divorced’ (p. 171).

31. Edmund Burke, Reﬂections on the Revolution in France, ed. H.D. Mahoney

(Indianapolis: Merrill, 1955), p. 11. All subsequent references are taken from
this edition, and are given in parentheses in the text.

32. Doanld Pease, ‘Sublime Politics’, in Mary Arensberg, ed., The American

Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 21–9 at
p. 21. Quoted in Mishra, The Gothic Sublime, p. 28.

33. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, p.168.

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Coetzee and the Animals: the
Quest for Postcolonial Grace

Dominic Head

229

Coetzee and the Gothic

It is clear that decolonization, in its concentration on ‘process, not
arrival’, and with its propensity to generate new cultural and political
energies, embodies a host of ongoing challenges to given (colonial) cul-
tural and epistemological boundaries.

A fertile area of cross-fertilization

thus emerges between the postcolonial and the Gothic, especially where
the latter – a post-Enlightenment phenomenon – is conceived as

less an unrestrained celebration of unsanctioned excesses and more
an examination of the limits produced in the eighteenth century to
distinguish good from evil, reason from passion, virtue from vice and
self from other. Images of light and dark focus, in their duality, the
acceptable and unacceptable sides of the limits that regulate social
distinctions.

The examination of those limits continues to prove fertile, and a fasci-
nating locus of this interaction of the postcolonial and the Gothic is
the literature of South Africa, which has a long history of treatments of
repression, terror and the uncanny. Indeed, if the uncanny is accurately
deﬁned as the effect of ‘the irruption of fantasies, suppressed wishes and
emotional and sexual conﬂicts’, one might consider colonial South
Africa, before as well as during the apartheid era, as an obvious place to
look for instances of the postcolonial uncanny.

One of the most

notable instances of this is J.M. Coetzee’s depiction of Magda in In the
Heart of the Country (1977): Magda, the daughter of colonialism (intel-
lectually and historically), is depicted as being raped by the servant
that she desires (Hendrik), and this is one element in the book’s

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demonstration that her attempts to establish a new epoch, based on
a love for the people, and not just the land, is defeated by her own
intellectual baggage.

In successive novels Coetzee has deployed a controlled evocation of

terror in order to analyse the colonial and emerging postcolonial
psyche, and the ‘terror’ is invariably made to uncover the faultlines and
contradictions in given forms of discourse. Dusklands (1974) provides
an excellent example of this, in summary. Here Coetzee offers an
implicit analysis of colonial contexts of writing by placing in parallel
two situations with their associated discursive modes: the Defense
Department analysis of the US involvement in Vietnam, and the travel
writing of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonizers of the Cape.
In Dusklands, the exposure of colonial violence is relatively straightfor-
ward, however. More complex problems arise through the testing of
limits for the liberal White, confronted with terrors that stretch his or
her resolve. The ethical awakening of the magistrate in Waiting for the
Barbarians (1980) is interesting in this connection. An essential com-
ponent of this is the magistrate’s dawning awareness that he is tainted
by the operations of the barbarian agents of ‘Empire’ and shares some-
thing of their mindset. Coetzee’s Gothicism is at its most pronounced
here, since the process of doubling, through which a character identi-
ﬁes with the object of fear, is a central strategy for self-revelation in
Gothic ﬁction.

The treatment of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians reveals the

extent (and so also the limits) of Coetzee’s Gothicism. Torture is another
standard Gothic motif, and an excellent way of unleashing repressed
violence into the ﬁctional world, and so of examining the hidden
corners of the rational bourgeois psyche. But torture, or the possibility
of it, was a fact of daily life for many people in apartheid South Africa,
so the representation of it in Coetzee’s ﬁction strikes a chilling, and
literal chord.

Coetzee has written of Waiting for the Barbarians as being a novel

speciﬁcally about torture and its impact on the ‘man of conscience’. In
his essay on this topic he goes on to consider the justiﬁcation for, and
also the dangers in, the preoccupation with torture in the South African
novel. Writers are drawn to the topic, argues Coetzee, ﬁrst because the
connection between torturer and tortured is an extreme, compelling
metaphor for authoritarian oppression more generally; and, second,
because there is no individual interaction more private and extreme
than that which occurs in the torture chamber. Coetzee’s implication
is that the novelist feels a moral obligation to interrogate this hidden

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‘vileness’, but ﬁnds therein an archetypal situation of ﬁctional creativ-
ity, ideal for the revelation of dark human mysteries.

So far, so Gothic. But in discussing the potential pitfalls of this fasci-

nation Coetzee sharpens its political signiﬁcance, and makes us aware
of the actual context that overshadows – and so diminishes the ethical
viability – of our interest in the literary motif. The basic dilemma in the
treatment of torture in a context such as apartheid South Africa is that
the writer fails either by ignoring it, or by ‘reproducing’ it through
representation. The generation of ‘fear’ is then entirely negative, quite
unlike the productive Gothic exploration of hidden psychological
impulses: the writer becomes the unwitting agent of the repressive state,
reproducing the fear upon which its power depends. Resolving this
dilemma is the difﬁcult task the writer faces, in seeking to imagine
torture and death on his or her terms.

Coetzee resolves the problem

very well in Waiting for the Barbarians. In those scenes where the mag-
istrate is tortured, Coetzee treads a ﬁne line between prosecuting the
character’s moral journey, and generating a stultifying fear of moral
protest. He is successful because he makes us share the magistrate’s
wondering bewilderment at the activities of the torturer, as here in his
appraisal of Joll:

Looking at him I wonder how he felt the very ﬁrst time: did he,
invited as an apprentice to twist the pincers or turn the screw or
whatever it is they do, shudder even a little to know that at that
instant he was trespassing into the forbidden? I ﬁnd myself wonder-
ing too whether he has a private ritual of puriﬁcation, carried out
behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with
other men.

Along with the amazement, there is also an element of empathy, an
engagement with the idea of transgression and initiation. The afﬁnity
hinted at here between the magistrate and Joll is part of the magistrate’s
self-critique. But beyond this evocation of psychological terror lies
Coetzee’s trepidation about the reality of apartheid. Here, as through-
out his work, a consciousness of the troubling tension between world
and text fashions the mode of writing, steering him away from the
exploration of ‘excess’ (as a preliminary to the reassertion of reason)
that is more usually associated with the Gothic.

The allegorizing impulse also concerns Coetzee in this novel, ensur-

ing that his treatment of fear has, as a focus, another intellectual and
discursive dilemma. Even in Age of Iron (1990), Coetzee’s most realistic

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novel of the apartheid era, the threat to the white, liberal sensibility is
steered skilfully away from the generation of reactionary terror: for Mrs
Curren, her emerging sense of personal insigniﬁcance is made manifest
through an exploration and development of the confessional mode, and
this literary project becomes the book’s main focus.

The representation of violence, however, remains fraught with difﬁ-

culties. The limitations that Coetzee interrogates in his depiction of
Magda in In the Heart of the Country are certainly clear: her failure to get
fully beyond the codes of South African pastoral inhibit her attempts
to ﬁnd a way of loving the people and not merely the land. It is risky,
of course, to depict the rape of a white woman by a black man in the
exploration of postcolonial intellectual repression. In doing so the
writer runs the clear risk of generating the kind of reactionary terror
which would short-circuit the more productive implications of the
Gothic, because the fantasy about the black man as rapist is a recurring
topos in the discourse of racism. In the Heart of the Country eschews
the problem through its elaborate narrative procedures: this is a ludic,
postmodernist novel in which the certainty of event is made open to
doubt, and secondary to the investigation of how discourse constructs
the self: ‘I make it all up in order that it shall make me up’ is Magda’s
instructive summary of this impulse.

As with Age of Iron, Coetzee’s

literary self-consciousness prevents the novel from generating a regres-
sive terror.

The multiple rape that lies at the heart of Disgrace (1999) – a novel

that is more bluntly realistic than Coetzee’s earlier novels – is more prob-
lematic. The actual event is not described, but the brutality of it and its
effects is made quite clear. David Lurie’s daughter Lucy seems to accept
her father’s analysis of the rapists, or some version of it, that ‘it was
history speaking through them’.

By refusing to lay charges, and by

accepting the arrangement offered by her neighbour Petrus – to become
an additional ‘wife’ to him, in exchange for his protection, even though
he has a family connection with one of the rapists (p. 200) – she seems
to capitulate to a protracted exercise in blackmail and extortion. Of
course, the parallel between the sexually predatory Lurie and the rapists
is obvious enough. But as the punitive sexual violence endured by Lucy
seems bound up with Petrus’s expansionist designs on Lucy’s land, her
defeat seems to epitomize a depressing postcolonial lesson. As Elizabeth
Lowry puts it: ‘what Disgrace ﬁnally shows us is the promised victory of
one expansionist force over another, with women as pawns, the objects
of punitive violence.’

This might seem to close down the productive

‘fear’ that the Gothic can generate since, rather than an informed exam-

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ination of the colonial psyche, we are presented with a simple contest
of brutal regimes.

Confession is another theme in Coetzee’s oeuvre that reveals both the

extent and the limits of his Gothicism, especially in connection with
Disgrace. In both Age of Iron (1990) and The Master of Petersburg (1994)
Coetzee engages in an extended investigation of the potential of the
confessional mode, seeking to extract from it a secular equivalent of
absolution. The most notable use of confession as a Gothic device is
found in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justiﬁed
Sinner, in which Hogg uses two narrative perspectives, thus making the
ﬁrst-person confession of ‘sinner’ Robert Wringhim subject to doubt.
Hogg’s Gothicism is representative of those ‘fantasies of the late Roman-
tic period’ in which the ‘difﬁcult relation of self to world’ becomes a
focus.

Coetzee’s use of confession reads back to Dostoevsky, but his

development of the mode fashions a postcolonial equivalent to Hogg’s
agonized Romanticism. Age of Iron is the principal text, an extended
letter/ﬁrst-person confession in which the dying Mrs Curren addresses
her absent daughter, living in the US, and comes to terms with her own
insigniﬁcance in the struggle of resistance in late-apartheid South Africa.
In a characteristic double-move Coetzee ﬁnds a way of circumventing
the problems associated with secular confession, and of establishing a
position of limited authority for a protagonist who has been cast aside
by the currents of history.

In Disgrace Coetzee seeks a secular equivalent of absolution, too; but

now he has recourse to other means that are quite different to his rich
investigations of the confessional mode in previous novels. Confession,
in fact, becomes banal in Disgrace. This is clear in the episode in which
Lurie is brought before the committee convened to consider the com-
plaint brought by Melanie Isaacs, the student with whom Lurie has an
affair. Ostensibly, this is an ‘inquiry’, but it soon becomes clear that
some members of the committee have prejudged the issue. Dr Farodia
Rassool is the punitive feminist who carries the burden of Coetzee’s
censure. Forgetting the committee’s brief, she seeks to punish Lurie, and
forces him to make a ‘confession’ of guilt (pp. 51–2). But Lurie’s will-
ingness to accept the charges, and his confession that he ‘became a
servant of Eros’, are not presented in the terms that Rassool requires:
that is, a confession to the ‘abuse of a young woman’ (p. 53).

One is initially reminded of Colonel Joll’s pursuit of truth/pain in

Waiting for the Barbarians, where torture is used to generate the desired
‘truth’. In that novel, the allegorical dimension, embracing the

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mutability of language as well as the imperial mindset, affords a treat-
ment of ‘interrogation’ on more than one level. The more overtly real-
istic codes of Disgrace, by contrast, make this episode seem a ﬂat
renunciation of political correctness.

The real challenge here is to the liberal sensibility that might have to

accept the integrity of a ‘confession’ made in terms that seem quite
other to the normative codes of a situation. Moreover, in the context
of a contemporary South Africa experimenting with its Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, this demonstration of a hearing in which
justice is predetermined strikes a disturbing note. Critics of the TRC
have suggested that it might have had ‘a very partial and selective
approach to the truth’, and that ‘had it been more balanced, expert and
authoritative, its impact would have been far greater’.

Just as a certain

kind of feminist might ﬁnd it uncomfortable to confront the ‘otherness’
of male desire, so did the TRC struggle to remain impartial at all
times.

Coetzee’s coded warning here about the machinations of neo-

colonialism tallies with his representation of the expansionist designs
of Petrus.

The immediate political resonance of Disgrace is ominous and depress-

ing. There is, however, another way of approaching this novel, and this
may be unlocked by the essential component of the Gothic: its ability
to generate counter-narratives that display ‘the underside of enlighten-
ment and humanist values’.

Such a challenge is nowhere more appar-

ent than in Coetzee’s treatment of animal rights in Disgrace and in The
Lives of Animals (1999), books that need to be read as complementary
works.

Coetzee and the animals

My interest in these works locates another (associated) intellectual
nexus – the point of intersection between postcolonialism and eco-
criticism. Taken together, these two books offer a unique insight into
the issue that lies at the heart of the ecocritical project; namely, how do
the aesthetic effects and ethical questions generated by literature bear
on the relationship between human beings and the rest of nature? And
since eco-criticism seems to me to raise interesting questions about the
nature of literary studies, perhaps inviting a re-evaluation of its premises
and procedures, these books by Coetzee are particularly germane. Both
deal extensively with the ethical justiﬁcation of teaching and studying
literature at university level.

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However, if The Lives of Animals and Disgrace invite a discussion of

professional self-consciousness, they also oblige us to engage with the
more obvious question of animal rights. In The Lives of Animals Coetzee
invites us, at one level, to share a ‘literal cast of mind’ with Elizabeth
Costello, who insists that ‘when Kafka writes about an ape’, he is ‘talking
in the ﬁrst place about an ape’.

The consideration of animals, perhaps,

is not substitutable, a convenient vehicle, merely, used to bring into the
foreground more general questions of professional ethics. Perhaps the
problem of animal rights is bound inextricably together with questions
pertaining to professional ethics and literary aesthetics in these works.
And if this implies a challenge to given cultural and epistemological
boundaries, these boundaries may have a bearing on the teaching
and reception of literature, as well as on the utilitarian evaluation of
animals, a notorious legacy of Enlightenment rationality.

The Lives of Animals, containing two metaﬁctional stories that

comprised the 1997–98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University, serves
to complicate the relationship between these areas of attention. In
Costello, Coetzee invents a celebrated novelist who is invited to speak
at ‘Appleton College’, and chooses to discourse on animals, a particu-
lar hobby-horse of hers. Coetzee’s listeners (and readers) cannot know
the extent to which Costello espouses the author’s own views, and this
forces our attention through and beyond the literal content to a con-
sideration of the metaﬁctional frame. Costello’s views are meant to
arrest our attention, however. Her views are systematically challenged
by other characters in the narrative, though she is sometimes seen to
occupy the intellectual as well as the moral high ground.

Much of the book reveals connections with work on moral philoso-

phy and animal rights. The thrust of Costello’s convictions about equal-
ity is that animals may well (in Peter Singer’s words) ‘possess both
memory of the past and expectations about the future, . . . that they are
self-aware, that they form intentions and act on them.’ This refutes ‘the
doctrine that places the lives of members of our species above the lives
of members of other species’, and removes the justiﬁcation for killing
those non-human animals that possess the attributes of ‘persons’.

Singer’s reﬂection on The Lives of Animals – a (perhaps misguided)
attempt at ﬁction in imitation of Coetzee – he distinguishes his intel-
lectual position from that of Costello: ‘There’s a more radical egalitari-
anism about humans and animals running through her lecture than I
would be prepared to defend’ (p. 86). Even so, her familiarity with the
kinds of argument that Singer and others have espoused suggests a

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signiﬁcant intellectual marker, a post-Christian challenge to the doc-
trines of ‘speciesism’.

This signals the book’s principal evocation of

‘terror’, the exposure of self-interest implicit in humanist reason and
rationality. Coetzee seeks to make his readers uneasy on this score; but,
in another unsettling manoeuvre, he takes us beyond a straightforward
rational and literal engagement with the arguments.

The question of sympathy is crucial, here. Our reception of the prin-

cipal characters is determined as much by the domestic drama as it is
by the quality of the arguments. Costello has come to stay with her son
John Bernard, and her daughter-in-law, Norma. John is a professor at
the college, and Norma is an embittered philosopher who has failed to
secure an academic post. There is mutual hostility between Norma and
Elizabeth, but it is Norma’s failure to extend hospitality to her ageing
mother-in-law that is emphasized. Norma scoffs at Elizabeth during her
public lecture, seeks to undermine her at the dinner, ridicules her ideas
in private, and refuses, though she is awake, to get up to say goodbye
on the morning of her departure. Thus, even where Norma might offer
an important corrective to Elizabeth’s views, we are not inclined to let
her carry the day. One of the most important observations is given to
Norma, in fact: that ‘there is no position outside of reason where you
can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason’ (p.
48). Elizabeth’s arguments might be seen to be undermined by this dif-
ﬁculty; but Coetzee coaxes his readers to sympathize with Elizabeth
rather than Norma, and so to experience the principle of sympathy over
reason that Elizabeth seeks to advance.

The kernel of Costello’s objection to reason lies in the account of

experiments on an ape in a cage, designed to encourage him to over-
come the practical difﬁculties of reaching food placed increasingly
further from his reach. Costello suggests that the thoughts of an ape in
such an experiment might conceivably be focused on its relationship to
its captors – ‘why is he starving me? . . . Why has he stopped liking me?’
– rather than on the more mundane ‘how does one use the stick to reach
the bananas?’ (pp. 28–9). Yet the ape is driven from ‘the purity of
speculation’ and towards ‘lower, practical, instrumental reason’. In her
reformulation of this opposition, Costello pits ‘ethics and metaphysics’
against ‘practical reason’.

As her argument develops, Costello privileges ‘fullness, embodiedness’

over ‘thinking, cogitation’ (p. 33). She is interested in sympathy, the
faculty of the heart ‘that allows us to share at times the being of
another’, insisting that ‘there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagi-
nation’ (pp. 34–5). In the seminar presentation in ‘The Poets and the

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Animals’ Costello demonstrates, through a reading of Ted Hughes’s
poems ‘The Jaguar’ and ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’, that the literary
imagination can foster this sympathetic faculty: in these poems, she
argues, Hughes is ‘feeling his way toward a different kind of being-in-
the-world’ which involves ‘inhabiting another body’ rather than
another mind (p. 51). A revealing aspect of this is what her son calls
her ‘antiecologism’ (p. 55): Costello is struck by the irony that the
knowledge and appreciation of ecosystems, which justiﬁes an ecologi-
cal philosophy, can be comprehended by human beings alone, and so
cannot lead to the state of at-oneness she seeks. The implication is clear:
the capacity for sympathy, for a different kind of being-in-the-world, is
frustrated by humanity’s intellect (pp. 53–4).

It remains true, however, that the sympathetic faculty, which the

literary effect can promote, is identiﬁed by dint of intellectual effort,
much as Costello’s war with reason has to be conducted through a
process of careful reasoning. Costello implicitly accepts (as, it seems,
does Coetzee) the double-bind that she also laments. Her visit to Apple-
ton College serves to demonstrate the inevitability of this double-bind,
and to imply an inevitable contradiction inherent in our benign inter-
ventions in the non-human world. She demonstrates that it is the
essence of our Being to be caught between sympathy and reason, much
as Coetzee’s text puts his readers through the same contradictory expe-
rience. It is a profound realization, and a deft literary enactment.

The subtlety of this can be contrasted with the reaction of Costello’s

son. On the last day of her visit he asks her: ‘Do you really believe,
Mother, that poetry classes are going to close down the slaughter-
houses?’ (p. 58), and the reader should recognize the blunt inappropri-
ateness of this question which entirely misses the point. Costello has
shown that it is the business of literature and of literary analysis to foster
and examine the human faculty for sympathy with another as an ethical
imperative, even while the experience and the process might reveal
crucial limitations and contradictions. This revelation of the paradoxi-
cal nature of ethical experience – and the relationship of literature to it
– has signiﬁcant implications for academic life, as we shall see. But the
mechanistic, causal chain implied in the son’s question, ‘do you believe
that poetry classes are going to close down the slaughterhouses?’, is of
a different order of thinking. It is, in the terms established by The Lives
of Animals, an unethical question, of the same order as ‘how does one
use the stick to reach the bananas?’

The ethical questions that The Lives of Animals asks us to consider

are ‘what is the relationship between literature and the faculty of

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sympathy, and how does the intellectual life frustrate this faculty?’ At
the end of the book the son attempts to console his mother, overcome
by the terror of her vision, where the reasoning element (which invites
her to draw a comparison between the slaughterhouses and the
Holocaust) links up disastrously with her empathic sense: she senses a
stupefying crime being committed by meat-eaters all around her, and
this poisons her social relations (p. 69). This is articulated on the drive
to the airport and, sensing that his mother is also affected by an inti-
mation of her own mortality, the son makes an attempt to comfort her:
‘he pulls the car over, switches off the engine, takes his mother in his
arms. He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old ﬂesh. “There, there,”
he whispers in her ear. “There, there. It will soon be over” ’ (p. 69). This
apparent conﬁrmation of impending death is hardly the most com-
forting offering. And the son’s lack of sympathy, his inability to imagine
even his own mother’s being, is indicated in his implied observation –
‘the smell of cold cream, of old ﬂesh’ – which suggests his cold appraisal
of a woman who will soon be a corpse.

In perhaps the most lucid immediate critical response to Disgrace,

Mike Marais argues that Coetzee ‘appears to stage a particular aesthetic
and ethical problem’ in the novel, a problem which centres on death
as both a literal and ineffable thing.

Following Maurice Blanchot,

Marais speculates on the notion that ‘language brings death into the
world’, since ‘through language, the subject negates the being or pres-
ence of things’. This view of language means that the attempt, through
literature, to reach beyond the ontological solitude of the individual
monadic subject is already undermined: ‘in attempting to represent the
other, the representational medium of the text always inevitably fore-
closes on, and therefore negates, the other.’ Marais suggests that
Disgrace ﬁnds a way round this state of imprisonment, initially through
its self-conscious acknowledgement of this parlous state, which is
implied in Lurie’s opera ‘about Teresa Guiccioli’s repeated and futile
attempts to summon the dead Byron’. The recognition of such futility
produces a positive implication, however: ‘it is only through its failure
to represent the other that the literary text may recognize the other as
other’. It is this recognition that opens the way to genuine care and com-
passion for the other, and that suggests that the novel ‘may inspire
ethical action’.

In this reading, the ‘failure to instantiate the other is also a failure to

eliminate the other’, and this ‘enables the excession of the other’. Marais
suggests that there have been other ‘ﬁgures of death and excession’
in Coetzee’s work – John in Age of Iron, and Pavel in The Master of

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Petersburg – key ﬁgures in Coetzee’s ongoing project to examine, self-
consciously, ‘the relation to alterity that is established in writing’. Death
is the crucial ﬁgure for ‘an alterity that cannot be contained’, and that
opens up the possibility of ethical action. In accordance with this logic,
Marais reads Lurie’s ‘mercy-killing of the lame and stray dog which he
has grown to love’ as ‘a loving gift, or sacriﬁce . . . to death, the absolute
other’.

I wish to applaud these ‘preliminary observations’, which strike me

as being astonishingly perceptive for a review article.

Marais’s reading

also serves to bolster the argument for Coetzee’s continuing use of
Gothic effects, suggesting that ﬁgures of death and excession have
become more central in his novels of the 1990s. However, I also wish
to question the emphasis this article gives, the version of the ethical it
outlines for Disgrace. There is certainly a more obvious moral tale to be
found in the novel, rooted in the events depicted, and the career of
Lurie towards some kind of redemption. This is not to say that a self-
reﬂexive engagement with ethics and aesthetics is not there to be found:
indeed, all of Coetzee’s novels engage with these issues, and can be seen
to operate on more than one level. My quibble is simply that the dif-
ferent ‘levels’ should be seen to cohere, that the ethical view should be
consistent across the various planes of signiﬁcation.

The treatment of death presents an obvious problem in this connec-

tion, if we give credence to Marais’s reading. The productive state of
consciousness encouraged by recognizing uncontainable and unrepre-
sentable death as the perfect ﬁgure of alterity may not square fully with
the novel’s evocation of actual death. In The Lives of Animals, of course,
the son’s lack of sympathy (or ethical capacity) is indicated in his cold
appraisal of his mother nearing death. Sanguinity about death indicates
a failure of imagination, a negative ethical capacity. The crucial episode
in Disgrace, the locus of Lurie’s redemption, is the one in which he takes
responsibility for the humane killing of the dog that has befriended
him. Bev Shaw, the woman who runs the Animal Welfare League clinic,
has indicated that it is a moral imperative to ‘mind’ if one is to perform
the mercy killing of animals: ‘I wouldn’t want someone doing it for me
who didn’t mind. Would you?’, she asks Lurie (p. 85). This ‘reverence’
might seem to lend death that aura of uncontainable alterity; yet
Coetzee may be more interested in distinguishing between competing
interests and different kinds of death.

Lurie’s progression towards redemption is recorded speciﬁcally in

terms of his responses to animals after his departure from Cape Town,
and after his arrival at his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the Eastern

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Cape province. An indication of his capacity for change is given in the
scene in which he repeats, rather mechanically, the view of the ‘Church
Fathers’ that, unlike the souls of humans, the souls of animals ‘are tied
to their bodies and die with them’. Yet he makes this remark when Lucy
has found him asleep in the cage of the abandoned old bulldog bitch,
Katy (p. 78). His body inclines him towards an afﬁnity that he is not
yet able to articulate. Indeed, his most crass pronouncement comes in
the following scene, in reply to Bev Shaw’s sense that he likes animals:
‘I eat them, so I suppose I must like them, some parts of them’, he quips
(p. 81). Coetzee is careful to discredit Lurie in this scene in which his
shameful appraisal of Bev Shaw’s unattractiveness is given in lingering
detail (through Lurie’s focalization, pp. 81–2). This is before the attack
on the farm, with the physical assault on Lurie and the multiple rape
of Lucy. With hindsight, however, a parallel between the predatory Lurie
and Lucy’s rapists is unavoidable; so, too, is the sense that Lurie’s
journey towards redemption requires him to give up his predatory mas-
culinity and become a different kind of animal.

The attackers pour methylated spirits over Lurie and set light to him.

His burns are not severe, but he suffers a mild disﬁgurement that serves
to underscore the loss of physical attractiveness he has already begun
to feel in middle age, and to which he initially responded with ‘an
anxious ﬂurry of promiscuity’ (p. 7). The attack does not entirely alter
his attitude to sex: there is the episode in which he buys the services of
a prostitute after being humiliated by Melanie Isaacs’ boyfriend (though
this occurs after the more thoughtful inward expression of thankfulness
for the way that he has been enriched by all his sexual partners (pp.
192–4)); and there is the earlier equivocal episode of his liaison with
Bev Shaw, which he sees as a kind of personal abasement (p. 150). This
is no simple progression towards a personal awakening; rather, it is the
fumbling readjustment of an ageing individual who feels himself to be
‘not a bad man but not good either’ (p. 195). It is Coetzee’s singular
achievement to have found a way to make the readjustment of his
(sometimes appalling) protagonist coherent, moving and convincing.

It is the response to animals that supplies the clarity, of course, and

this emerges especially after the attack. An important scene is the one
in which Petrus acquires some sheep, two black-faced Persians, to
slaughter for his party. Exasperated at the treatment of these animals,
Lurie unties them and allows them to drink and to graze (p. 123). As
the moment of slaughter gets nearer, he becomes increasingly con-
cerned for them, feeling that ‘suddenly and without reason, their lot
has become important to him’ (p. 126). Pushed by Lucy to explain his

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reaction, he insists that he has not changed his ideas, that he still does
not believe ‘that animals have properly individual lives’. ‘Nevertheless’,
he says, ‘in this case I am disturbed. I can’t say why’ (pp. 126–7). What
has come home to Lurie, in a rural location where butchering is a
domestic task, is the fact of slaughter. This may seem like the predictable
horror of the urban-dweller confronted with the harsh realities of rural
subsistence, but the moral dimension to this is more complex. To Lurie’s
emerging sensibility, the keeping of animals is incompatible with killing
them. It is this utilitarianism at which he baulks, a response that may
not be dependent on an identiﬁcation with individual animals, but is
certainly inspired by an identiﬁcation with their suffering as sensate
beings, as much as by a projected code of civilized human behaviour.

Lurie’s evolving responses to animals, and speciﬁcally to the killing

of animals, suggests that death is not (or not just) a ﬁgure of mysteri-
ous or uncontainable otherness, but that a more speciﬁc argument
about it is being constructed. The fact that Lurie comes to distinguish
between different kinds of killing, and different kinds of death experi-
ence, suggests the true ethical focus. When Lurie baulks at the utili-
tarianism of keeping animals for slaughter, and follows the path that
obliges him to participate in humane killing, he takes responsibility for
the dispensing of death. He understands the imperative to ‘mind’ about
killing that an empathic and imaginative outlook necessitates; but he
also accepts the responsibility of making a moral choice. When Lurie
decides to ‘give up’ the dog that has befriended him, he has chosen the
moment at which the death should occur. He could keep the dog for a
while longer, but knows the moment must come when this decision
will have to be taken.

Death is thus not ‘uncontainable’ in this practical sense. There is a

partial parallel, here, to the way in which the Gothic evokes that which
is excessive and which induces fear, but does so in order to re-examine
limits and to reassert a principle of reasoning. In a similar process, Lurie
encounters the fear of the postcolonial backlash, and the broader horror
(as he sees it) of the arrogant human treatment of animals as things. He
then discovers a new humility that inverts his former sense of self-
importance as a predatory sexual being of a particular caste, a process
that is provoked by the imaginative, the intuitive, but that is resolved
by the reassertion of reason and the gaining of self-knowledge.

In one sense, the ending is remorseless, since the killing of the dog is

also the extermination of the only being that responds to his music,
and his effort of composition is the ﬁnal assertion of his professional
intellectual self. But there is a logic in the pattern that smothers this

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‘creativity’, and the falsity it embodies. Lurie’s professionalism is
enshrined in his afﬁnity for the Romantic poets: ‘For as long as he can
remember, the harmonies of The Prelude have echoed within him’ (p.
13). Yet his brutal education in South African rural life undermines the
false pastoral. There is a poignant moment at the end of the novel when
he encounters the ‘lightly pregnant’ Lucy working in a ﬁeld, engrossed
in her labour, an idyllic scene ‘ready-made for a Sargent or a Bonnard’.

But there is an imperative that this pastoral image must be seen to
dissolve, given that the perceiving eye is discredited: ‘The truth is, he
has never had much of an eye for rural life, despite all his reading in
Wordsworth’ (p. 218).

There is, of course, a degree of ambivalence in a story of the way in

which personal disgrace can lead to something that approximates a state
of grace, and some reviewers were perplexed by some of the apparent
contradictions. Adam Mars-Jones, for example, felt that Coetzee had
produced ‘a story of redemption and of collapse, just as a famous optical
illusion is simultaneously a duck and a rabbit, but can only be seen at
any one moment as one or the other.’

But this is inevitable in a novel

that demonstrates that human experience is necessarily caught between
sympathy and reason. Coetzee, as we have seen, uses the fear of intel-
lectual and social collapse in order to discover the boundary of reason.
A kind of terror is evoked at the spectacle of the judgemental liberal aca-
demic – speciﬁcally in the brittle feminist Dr Farodia Rassool – that is
also, by extension, a terror of possible neocolonialist developments in
the new South Africa. Similarly, a horror of instrumental reason is gen-
erated, especially where this is revealed through a utilitarian attitude to
animals.

These fears are concentrated in the career of Lurie, and in the exhi-

bition of his emotional, intellectual, aesthetic and political bankruptcy.
His state of grace, premised on an intense empathy with abandoned and
condemned dogs, and denoted by his willing acceptance of the ‘visi-
torship’ that marks his new start with Lucy (p. 218), conjoins three key
attributes: empathy, responsibility and meekness. If it is helpful to trace
the Gothic elements that occur in Coetzee’s work – especially where
these locate and invite a reassessment of the limits of reason – it is also
appropriate to acknowledge that Coetzee’s Gothicism is an understated
strain: rarely does his work evoke excess to the degree commonly asso-
ciated with the Gothic. Indeed, the pursuit of meekness might, ﬁnally,
be seen to take his work in a quite different direction.

I intend ‘meekness’ in the sense in which Norberto Bobbio deﬁnes it.

For Bobbio, meekness is a ‘social virtue’, but one that is ‘the antithesis

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of politics’ understood as the expression of ‘the will for power’. In
Bobbio’s conception, ‘the meek are cheerful because they are inwardly
convinced that the world to which they aspire is better than the one
they are forced to inhabit.’ A meek person can thus ‘be depicted as the
precursor of a better world’.

In much of his ﬁction, but especially in

Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace, Coetzee has been
working towards this kind of celebration, in which meekness emerges
as a new kind of ethical-political grounding. Lurie has to start again with
nothing – other than the discovery of his own better impulses – in order
to emerge untainted, and is content to do so. The novel’s Gothic ele-
ments recede, along with the terror that they evoke. Redemption is in
the ascendancy, here, and this is an extraordinary conclusion to a novel
that is unequivocal in its presentation of postcolonial violence and
misunderstanding. Coetzee, as in all of his ﬁction, ties together ethics,
politics and aesthetics; and in confronting apparently insurmoun-
table difﬁculties – ideological, political and generational – he conjures
an astonishing and affecting aesthetic solution.

Notes

1. I quote Helen Tifﬁn on the importance of ‘process’: see ‘Post-Colonial

Literatures and Counter-Discourse’, Kunapipi 9 (1987), 3, 17–34, 17.

2. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 8.
3. Ibid., p. 11.
4. The two most obvious instances of this ‘doubling’ are found in Mary

Shelley’s Frankenstein, in the afﬁnity between Frankenstein and his monster,
and in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, in the identiﬁcation between Caleb
and Falkland.

5. See J.M. Coetzee, ‘Into the Dark Chamber: the Writer and the South African

State’, in David Attwell, ed., Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 361–8, at p. 363.

6. Ibid., p. 364.
7. J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians ([1980], Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1982), p. 12.

8. J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country ([1977], Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1982), p. 73. The rape itself is described differently ﬁve times in consecutive
passages (pp. 104–7). This both emphasizes the sense of violence and ordeal,
whilst also suggesting the possibility of fantasy, with Magda as psychological
victim.

9. J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Secker and Warburg, 1999), p. 156. Subse-

quent page references are to this edition and are given in the text.

10. Elizabeth Lowry, ‘Like a Dog’ (review of Disgrace and The Lives of Animals),

London Review of Books, 21, 20, 14 October 1999, pp. 12–14, at p. 14.

11. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge,

1988), p. 49.

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12. In an important essay Coetzee dwells on the ‘double thought’ that makes

confession unreliable in Dostoevsky. See ‘Confession and Double Thoughts:
Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky’, in Doubling the Point, pp. 251–93.

13. R.W. Johnson, ‘Why There is No Easy Way to Dispose of Painful History’

(review of The Truth About the Truth Commission by Anthea Jeffery), London
Review of Books, 21, 20, 14 October 1999, 9–11, at 9, 10.

14. Ibid. Johnson locates particular atrocities where the ﬁnal TRC Report is highly

selective in the evidence it uses.

15. Graham Pechey has argued that, after the election of 1994, South Africa

entered ‘not exactly a postcolonial phase but the latest of its neo-colonial
phases’. See ‘The Post-Apartheid Sublime: Rediscovering the Extraordinary’,
in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds, Writing South Africa: Literature,
Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), pp. 57–74, at p. 59.

16. Botting, Gothic, p. 2.
17. J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1999), p. 32. Subsequent page references are to this edition
and are given in parenthesis in the text.

18. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1999), pp. 115, 117.

19. Ibid., pp. 88–9.
20. Mike Marais, ‘The Possibility of Ethical Action: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’,

Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 5 (2000) 1, 57–63, 60.

21. Ibid., 59, 60.
22. Ibid., 61, 62.
23. Both the French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) and the American

painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) (who was best known for his society
portraits) turned to nature studies in their later years.

24. Adam Mars-Jones, ‘Lesbians are Like That Because They’re Fat. Stands to

Reason’ (review of Disgrace), Observer, 18 July 1999, 13.

25. See Norberto Bobbio, In Praise of Meekness: Essays on Ethics and Politics, trans.

Teresa Chataway (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), pp. 24, 35, 34, 31. Coetzee’s con-
ception of ethical action embraces non-human nature, of course; Bobbio’s
does not.

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Chrisman, Laura, 108, 109, 115
Coetzee, J.M., 11, 229–43

Age of Iron, 231–2, 233, 238
Disgrace, 232–3, 234, 235,

238–42

Dusklands, 230
In the Heart of the Country,

229–30, 232

The Life and Times of Michael K,

243

The Lives of Animals, 234–8
The Master of Petersburg, 233,

238–9

Waiting for the Barbarians,

230–1, 233

Collins, Wilkie, 93
Coleridge, S.T., 221, 222
Conan Doyle, Arthur, 91

Dacre, Charlotte, 35–55

Zoﬂoya, or The Moor, 6–7, 35,

45–52

Hours of Solitude, 36–7, 40–3

David, Deirdre, 139, 143, 145
Demoor, Marysa, 103–4
De Quincey, Thomas, 221, 222,

227–8n24

Devi, Mahasweta, 7

‘Pterodactyl, Pirtha and Puran

Sahay’, 62–6, 67n10

see also India

Dickens, Charles

Great Expectations, 137

Enlightenment, the, 1,2, 3, 58,

62, 64, 71, 78, 155, 171n13,
211, 213, 224, 225, 226, 229,
235

Empire Gothic, 136–40, 142

Farrell, J.G., 10, 172–91

A Girl In The Head, 182
The Hill Station, 188

Index

Africa, 35–6, 38, 40, 44, 45–6, 47,

48, 49–50, 51, 52, 53n8,
54n24, 91, 120, 123

Ahmad, Aijaz, 223
anti-semitism, 91, 122–4, 125–6,

134n24,n26, 153n34

Arata, Stephen, 92, 100n12
Auerbach, Nina, 91
Azim, Firdous, 73, 76, 81

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 210
Baldick, Chris, 4, 5
Baratynsky, E.A., 74–5, 79
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 21–2,

37–8

Beckett, Samuel, 178, 182, 216
Beckford, William

Vathek, 3, 6, 13–24, 31, 220–1,

222, 224

Behn, Aphra, 39
Belford, Barbara, 98
Bhabha, Homi, K., 138, 150, 208,

209–13, 215, 217, 218–20,
224, 225, 226

Binns, R.G., 174–5, 181
Bobbio, Norberto, 242–3
Boele, Otto, 79
Borges, Jorge Luis, 217–18
Botting, Fred, 89, 229, 234
Boumelha, Penny, 142–3, 144
Bowen, Elizabeth, 175
Brantlinger, Patrick, 4, 5, 92
Brontë, Charlotte

Jane Eyre, 9, 137–47, 148

Brontë, Emily

Wuthering Heights, 90, 145–6,

176

Bulgarin, Faddei, 76
Burke, Edmund, 224–5
Byron, Lord, 13–14, 146

Carter, Angela, 89
Castle, Terry, 140

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Farrell, J.G. – continued

The Lung, 182
The Siege of Krishnapur, 174,

180, 181, 183–8

The Singapore Grip, 172–4, 181,

183, 188

Troubles, 174, 176–80, 181,

183

see also Ireland

Female Gothic, 9, 136–54
ﬁn de siècle, 98, 137
Finney, Charles G.

‘The Circus of Dr. Lao’, 130–1

Fitzgerald, Scott

The Great Gatsby, 204

Foster, Roy, 175
Foucault, Michel, 2, 90, 227n14
Frank, Frederick S., 20–1
Franklin, Michael, 3
Frayling, Christopher, 92
Freud, Sigmund, 3, 57, 124, 210

Document Outline

Cover
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction: The Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism
1 Discovering Eastern Horrors: Beckford, Maturin and the Discourse of Travel Literature
2 Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial Moor
3 'Frankenstein' and Devi’s Pterodactyl
4 Pushkin and Odoevsky: the ‘Afro- Finnish’ Theme in Russian Gothic
5 A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcoloniality of Bram Stoker’s Dracula
6 Beyond Colonialism: Death and the Body in H. Rider Haggard
7 Horror, Circus and Orientalism
8 Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)-House: Revolution and Revelation in Colonial and Postcolonial Female Gothic
9 Crossing Boundaries: the Revision of Gothic Paradigms in 'Heat and Dust'
10 The Ghastly and the Ghostly: the Gothic Farce of Farrell’s ‘Empire Trilogy’
11 Arundhati Roy and the House of History
12 The Number of Magic Alternatives: Salman Rushdie’s 1001 Gothic Nights
13 Coetzee and the Animals: the Quest for Postcolonial Grace
Index

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